Major Wars and Regional Responses in Australia and New Zealand: International Relations as Apologetics and Exegesis (and Inadequate)

[Paper presented to the Panel WC76

Memorialization, Public Grieving and War in the Configuring of Political Community:

Regional and Local Perspectives 56th Annual Convention of the

International Studies Association New Orleans, LA 18 February 2015]

Judy Hemming University of Canberra judyhemming@me.com

Michael McKinley Australian National University macfhionnlaoich@icloud.com

 

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ABSTRACT

Judy Hemming and Michael McKinley

Major Wars and Regional Responses in Australia and New Zealand: International Relations as Apologetics and Exegesis (and Inadequate)

The respective histories of Australia and New Zealand since the late 19th Century are marked by the frequent wars fought alongside their dominant imperial, or alliance partner, but they are also the means by which both nations have sourced and over-determined their national identities. World War I especially set the tone for the narratives and all subsequent engagements in wars have called it forth – in the process adding to, and embellishing them. Currently, they now comprise a record which is openly spoken of – but in approving terms – as a myth of heroic, but necessary sacrifice despite the fact that, overwhelmingly and in strategic terms, the wars were defeats for the two nations. Indeed, the mythology seems impervious to the historical record constructed around the tenets of International Relations. This paper will argue that the reasons for this have to do with the narratives being only partially located in the discipline of IR – which over time has been complicit in preventing them becoming authorized, canonical, civil religious texts of an inerrant character. Governments, thus, have learned to use them as national litanies: they petition their citizens with them and are met with a recurring and generally enthusiastic responses.

 

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A Prefatory Comment This paper speaks of the regional responses by Australia and New Zealand to certain major wars but this does not imply that an ANZAC spirit suffuses strategy and policy to the point of congruence. Certainly, there are close affinities between the two countries – indeed, they are frequently held, in conjunction with New Guinea and neighbouring islands in the Pacific Ocean, to constitute a region known as “Australasia.” Moreover myth, legend and historical narrative have also combined to suggest a remarkable identity of ability and interests in war fighting from the Gallipoli landings through to the Vietnam War. German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, after facing a combined Australia – New Zealand infantry division in North Africa, is reported to have said that, “If I had to take hell, I would use the Australians to take it and the New Zealanders to hold it.” And as late as 1983, it was commonplace for both the political leadership and defence and strategic analysts in both Australia and New Zealand to proclaim, “the two countries constitute a singe strategic entity.”

They are, nevertheless, also quite distinct – geographically, demographically, culturally, economically, socially, and strategically, and sometimes, perhaps chronically, these differences dominate. They result in differences in style, too: whereas Australia is conscious of its continental size and riches arising from natural resources, and is boastful of “punching above its weight,” New Zealand is generally given to modest interventions on the unassailable basis that its resources are generally modest. Henry Grattan’s observation on the attraction – repulsion nature of another asymmetric dyad, Ireland’s proximity to England is, if geographically modified, applicable: the Tasman Sea precludes union just as the Pacific Ocean forbids separation.1 From the mid-1980s on, notable divergences have come to the fore, caused by such developments as the non-nuclear demarche taken by the New Zealand Labour Government under the Prime Ministership of David Lange. This had the initial effect of excluding New Zealand from the arrangements established under the ANZUS Treaty of 1951, forcing subsequent

                                                                                                               1 The distance from Wellington to Melbourne is 1,598 miles, slightly more than the distance between London and Moscow; between Auckland and Sydney the distance is 1,338 miles.

 

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Governments in New Zealand to think somewhat more independently, with the effect that previous national, characteristics in alliance and strategic thinking of a critical nature – evident but not emphasized during the Vietnam War - became more pronounced. Reflecting strong public opinion against any military action against Iraq that was not authorised by the United Nations, the New Zealand Government compromised by providing a military contribution to Operation Enduring Freedom in the form of a unit of combat engineers embedded with a larger British contingent of military engineers. And while the campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has been joined by Australia, as of late January 2015, the New Zealand Government has yet to decide whether New Zealand forces will be deployed. “When” should probably replace “whether.“ In a visit to the UK, Prime Minister John Key advised that his government was “exploring whether we will send a training contingent to probably work alongside the Australians in Iraq." The rationale was that terrorism was a global threat which New Zealand had to help counter and, more importantly it seems, any support from New Zealand for the fight against ISIS is "the price of the club", in being part of the Five Eyes (US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) intelligence arrangements.2 In the light of the history of commitments to the British Empire and the Australia – New Zealand – US Alliance relationship, not to deploy some form of military force would be unusual and fraught with anxiety. For the first half of the 20th Century such a decision would have been unthinkable but, even since then, regardless of whether the overall strategy of the US was thought to be in error, or simply questionable, there is a sense in Wellington (as in Canberra) that there is a need for subordinate partners to keep faith with Washington by means and gestures which indicate a less than wholehearted commitment but which, at the same time, are substantial and involve the respective forces of both countries being placed in harm’s way. In the following pages, therefore, if Australia seems to be the focus of attention more than New Zealand, it is because the actions relating to the focus of this paper are more in evidence.                                                                                                                2 “John Key: The price of being part of Five Eyes is joining ISIS fight,” One News, TVNZ, 21 January 2015, http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/john-key-price-being-part-five-eyes-joining-isis-fight-6221595 (accessed 22 January 2015).

 

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Introduction This paper is written at a curious juncture in the history of Australia and New Zealand: April 2015 denotes the 100th anniversary of the failed Dardanelles’ Campaign in general, and the abortive Gallipoli landings in World War I in particular, from which popular historical accounts have derived the advent of their respective nationhoods. The same month will see the 60th anniversary of another failure: Australia’s dishonestly justified commitment to the war in Vietnam;3 August will mark the 15th anniversary of the also dishonestly justified Australian commitment to Operation Desert Storm,4 and June will see the first anniversary of the “brazenly cynical” initiatives by the Australian Government to increase the national commitment to the war against Islamic State.5 It is fair to say that none of these events will receive the attention that a self-critical democracy ought to consider when celebrating its war dead. Indeed, status the centerpiece of Australian security strategy, the Australia – US alliance, in which name these deceptions were made, remains essentially untouched, even buttressed by assistance from such pro-alliance organisations as the government-founded and partly funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the Lowy Institute for International Policy (also partly government-funded); the United States Study Centre at the University of Sydney, and the Australia American Leadership Dialogue (AALD), founded in 1992 by Phil and Julie Scanlan, with the support of President George H.W. Bush. The last mentioned, as noted in a recent analysis of its activities, is only “nominally an exercise in informal diplomacy dedicated to fostering mutual understanding,” but in practice:

the AALD functions more like a pro-American lobby group as it seeks to preserve orthodox thinking and eschew dissenting perspectives. The AALD performs this

                                                                                                               3 For a short account of this decision see Michael Sexton, War For The Asking: Australia’s Vietnam Secrets (Penguin: Ringwood, Vic., 1981). 4 See Michael McKinley, “The ‘Bitterness of Being Right:’ Reflections on Australian Alliance Orthodoxy, the Gulf War, and the New World Order,” Ch. 7 in Michael McKinley (ed.), The Gulf War: Critical Perspectives (St. Leonards, NSW, and Canberra: Allen & Unwin in association with the Department of International Relations, RSPAS, ANU, 1994), p. 171. 5 See Richard Tanter, "Australia in America’s Iraq War 3.0", NAPSNet Policy Forum, November 20, 2014, http://nautilus.org/napsnet/napsnet-policy-forum/australia-in-americas-iraq-war-3-0/

 

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function in three main ways: by carefully framing discussion and debate, by socialising Australian elites into the alliance orthodoxy and by serving as a ‘gatekeeper’ of the status quo.6

Their efforts of course complement those of successive Australian Governments towards the same objectives. With the notable exception of Prime Minister Paul Keating’s public and controversial rejection of the Gallipoli experience as the birthplace of Australian nationhood, the political elite have taken great care to not only preserve it in popular memory, but also to nurture it as the “moment of genesis.”7 It is expensive and extensive: the Government has allocated at least $AUD325 million, and private donations of $AUD300 million are expected to be forthcoming to ensure the appropriate recall of the ANZAC landings. In a critical vein, James Brown, a former serving officer of the ADF in Afghanistan and Iraq notes as well:

In 2015 cruise ships will ply Anzac Cove as Bert Newton [television personality] narrates the war. One company has applied for permission to market an Anzac ice-cream, another here in Melbourne has been awarded $27million in contracts for Anzac events management. Government is crafting an Anzac merchandising plan to match. A century after Gallipoli, the Anzac spirit is being bottled, stamped, and sold.8

The prospect according to Brown is of Australians, “embarking on a discordant, lengthy, and exorbitant four-year festival for the dead.”9 In a comparative context this is extraordinary. The more than half a billion Australian dollars being spent by Australia is twice what Britain is spending

                                                                                                               6 Vince Scappatura, “The role of the AALD in preserving the Australia – US alliance,” Australian Journal of Political Science (49, 2): 596-610. 7 Renee Lockwood, “Sacrifice and the Creation of Group Identity: Case Studies of Gallipoli and Masada,” A Library of Social Science Essay, http://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/essays/lockwood.html, accessed 22 January 2015. 8 James Brown, “Excess in the Anzac centenary overlooks other military endeavours,” http://www.smh.com.au/national/ww1/excess-in-the-anzac-centenary-overlooks-other-military-endeavours-20140225-33foj.html, accessed 22 January 2015 (hereafter cited as Brown, “Excess in the ANZAC centenary”). 9 James Brown, ANZAC’s Long Shadow: The Cost of Our National Obsession (Collingwood, Vic., Redback, 2014), p. 24.

 

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and even in excess of what France has decided is fitting for its World War I commemoration.10

To this the historian, Henry Reynolds, provides a strong argument that it is to be seriously regarded as part of the militarisation of Australian history: Australia, he proposes, is obsessed with war,” and the desire to remember the war dead within a mindset that “is seemingly free from any consideration of the politics of a given conflict.” Of Australia’s Gallipoli moment he writes:

The commemoration of the Anzac landing lacks a searching assessment of the Allied powers’ territorial designs on the Ottoman Empire or the many dire consequences that followed and can still be felt. Australians seem to want to remember war without accepting moral responsibility for its ramified consequences.11

What mandates this? It is a question that has many answers and not all of them are relevant to this paper. It is tempting to derive some of them from critical understandings of the current Liberal-National Coalition Government of Australia: evidence indicates that it is remote from the general anxieties of the majority of the population, but so was its Labor predecessor, and so are many governments in the so-called democratic West.12 More specifically, it can, also like many of its predecessors be termed “adolescent” by which is meant that foreign and defence policy issues are generally subordinated to domestic interests and used for points-scoring; their treatment, moreover, lacks the gravitas they deserve.13 A contribution from the discipline of Political Psychology has, with abundant evidence, gone considerably further:

                                                                                                               10 Cindy Sheedy and Steve Offner, “Cover Story: Busting the ANZAC Myth,” uniken, http://uniken.unsw.edu.au/features/cover-story---busting-anzac-myth, accessed 18 June 2014. Research into the corresponding amount for WW I commemorations in New Zealand were inconclusive at the time of writing this paper (January 2015). By far the greatest publicity has been devoted to the $NZD17 million provided by the Lottery Grants Board; nevertheless, it is the case that many directly-funded government projects have been completed, or are under way n the form of dedicated capital works or expansions and refurbishments of established war memorials and museums. 11 Henry Reynolds, “Militarisation Marches On,” Inside Story, 25 September 2014, http://insidestory.org.au/militarisation-marches-on, accessed 22 January 2015. 12 Richard Cooke, The People Versus the Political Class,” http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2014/june/1401544800/richard-cooke/people-versus-political-class, accessed 22 January 2014. 13 See Peter Hartcher, The Adolescent Country (Penguin Australia, 2014).

 

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Lissa Johnson, a clinical psychologist, begins her analysis by noting that the country has a Prime Minister:

who threatens to shirt-front the Russian president, a finance minister who calls the opposition leader a girlie-man and a government advisor for whom “Abos”, “darkies” “muzzies”, “chinky-poos” and “whores” rolls comfortably off the tongue . . .14

She then embeds various other empirical observations of the government in the literature of political psychology. These include, a promotion of inequality, resistance to change, the need for cognitive closure, a suspicion of science and the arts, and an aversion to new experiences, complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity in favour of that which is familiar, predictable and simple. Her conclusion: “If the Abbott government was an individual, he would be a psychopath.”15 Several well-organised, research-oriented and persuasively argued attempts to counter these pathologies have been mounted for the purpose of effecting reform either of the historical record, or of the political processes leading to war, but it has to be said that, judged by the criteria of widespread change in public attitudes and understanding, they have been largely unsuccessful. Among such projects are Honest History and the Campaign for an Iraq War Inquiry (CIWI).16 The former, “a coalition of historians and others supporting the balanced and honest presentation and use of Australian history” with a “focus now is on the centenary of World War I because Australian history about that period has been highly politicised, for many different reasons.” Accordingly, it “promotes balanced consideration of Australian history, by making contesting, evidence-based interpretations available to students, teachers, universities, journalists and the public.”17 To

                                                                                                               14 Lissa Johnson, “What Makes Them Tick: Inside The Mind Of The Abbott Government,” Analysis, New Matilda, 26 October 2014, https://www.newmatilda.com/2014/10/26/what-makes-them-tick-inside-mind-abbott-government, accessed 22 January 2014. 15 Ibid. 16 Disclosure: the authors subscribe to the Honest History publications, and have been published on its website; both are also members of the Campaign for an Iraq War Inquiry. 17 http://www.honesthistory.net.au, accessed 23 January 2015.

 

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be noted is the fact that this initiative was largely undertaken by academics at the University College of the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra. By way of one example of this counter-intuitive development, is Peter Stanley, formerly Head of the Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia (2007–13); historian and curator at the Australian War Memorial (1980-2007), a position which included being both Head of the Historical Research Section and Principal Historian from 1987.

Prior to its establishment in 2012, several of what were to become Honest History’s founders were so concerned at the level of misunderstanding of Australian military history that they collaborated on two anthologies, Zombie Myths of Australian Military History and ANZAC’s Dirty Dozen;18 the cover of the first work illustrates the extent of their dismay:

zombie noun 1. A dead body brought to life by a supernatural force. 2. A person having no independent judgement, intelligence, etc.

CIWI’s primary objectives are, first, the simple claim upon any practicing democracy that Parliament should decide on the deployment of the Australian Armed Forces, and second, that the Australian Government should establish an official Inquiry into the processes and procedures whereby the Australian Defence Forces were committed to the war in Iraq in 2003. Notwithstanding historical practice of a contrary nature, or perhaps emboldened by them, all attempts by CIWI to persuade the Coalition Government and the Labor Opposition with regard to both have been rebuffed, the former on the grounds that it would dangerously restrict the Executive in war.

What should be noted is that CIWI shares with Honest History a membership that, at first glance, has some surprising inclusions from what would otherwise be seen as the foreign and defence policy establishment – several retired high profile senior diplomats of ambassadorial rank, a former

                                                                                                               18 Craig Stockings (ed.), Zombie Myths of Australian Military History: The 10 Myths That Will Not Die (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010), and Craig Stockings (ed.), ANZAC’s Dirt Dozen: 12 Myths of Australian Military History (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2012).

 

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Secretary of Defence (Dr. Paul Barratt), a former Chief of the General Staff, and Chief of the Australian Defence Force (General Peter Gration), and a former Prime Minister (Malcolm Fraser). Fraser, moreover, also a former Minister for the Army, and Minister for Defence has gone so far as to publish a plea for “truly independent Australia” and a repudiation of what the Australia - US Alliance has become.19 His argument is rooted in the chronic and obsessive dependence Australia developed in imperial times, before Federation and quotes the prophetic warnings given by H.B. Higgins in the late 19th Century to the effect that such an overweening sense of dependence would result in Australia being unquestioningly embroiled in the wars of empire without any reciprocal obligation being incurred by Britain, and by implication, the United States.20 Interestingly, the sole endorsement on the dust jacket, matched by a longer version immediately within the front cover, is provided by a former political opponent, Gareth Evans, Labor Government Foreign Minister from 1988 to 2006, and President of the International Crisis Group from 2000 to 2009. These offerings to one side, reform of the public memory, historical record, Parliament’s role in sending the ADF abroad, and the Australia – US alliance more generally, is limited to proposals that Australia will need to either resist, or accommodate to the rise of China and that this will inevitably cut across the tied of the alliance. The most prominent of those making them is Hugh White, a former high-ranking defence and foreign policy official and currently Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University.21 From their first appearance of White’s ideas in public, most mainstream commentators have met his writings and presentations on this subject with forms of rejection normally associated with denunciations of

                                                                                                               19 Malcolm Fraser with Cain Roberts, Dangerous Allies (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2014). 20 Ibid, pp. 24, 39, and 68. 21 In greater detail, Hugh White is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University. His work focuses primarily on Australian strategic and defence policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, and global strategic affairs especially as they influence Australia and the Asia-Pacific. He has served as an intelligence analyst with the Office of National Assessments, as a journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald, as a senior adviser on the staffs of Defence Minister Kim Beazley and Prime Minister Bob Hawke, and as a senior official in the Department of Defence, where from 1995 to 2000 he was Deputy Secretary for Strategy and Intelligence, and as the first Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). Source: https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/white-hj

 

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heresy by the established Church.22 White is aware of this and his outline of who they are, and the problems they create for just debate to be entered, is exceptionally relevant to the themes of this paper:

[These] people - some of whom I admire . . . believe Australia's commitment to its alliance transcends the ebb and flow of events. For them, the US alliance is more than just a policy instrument, to be kept while it works and discarded when it doesn't. For them, the alliance is an end in itself, an object of loyalty, part of our identity. For them, an Australia that abandoned the alliance would no longer be Australia. For them, no price is too high to pay to keep it going.23

What is described is a disposition to reflexively commit to wars and expeditionary forces ordained, essentially commanded, and controlled by the United States without any reference to the history of past involvements or they were ethical or just. The only rule that matters is to follow and fight; memory has been erased. Ignorance is embraced and knowledge of the unpalatable is discounted. The personality required is that of Rambo with Alzheimer’s disease. Progressively, as the alliance has developed, the present has become a time of deep foreboding because the public mind has become violently disordered. Richard Lichtman is most apposite when he concludes that “not only can individuals be dysfunctional and pathological but that societies can be irrational, self-destructive and given to denial, self-deception and violent self-contamination.”24

Exactly what is excised from the public mind, and why, is the burden of this paper. It will not be argued that the mainstream that is so resistant to self-reflection and change is unaware of facts and matters that, at the very least, should require it re-examine its positions; rather, it will be argued that these facts and matters are refused the status of what the Sydney University                                                                                                                22 See, for example, Hugh White, The China Choice: Why We Should Share Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). The titles of numerous other publications can be found at: https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/white-hj 23 Hugh White, “As China rises we must look beyond U.S. alliance,’ The Australian, 13 September 2010, available at http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/as-china-rises-we-must-look-beyond-the-us-alliance/story-e6frgd0x-1225919850496, accessed 23 January 2015. 24 Richard Lichtman, “The Violent Disorder of Our Public Mind,” http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/15304-the-violent-disorder-of-our-public-mind, accessed 23 January 2015.

 

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Realist philosopher, John Anderson, termed “epistemological egalitarianism” in favour of an approach derived from Orwell, namely, that not all facts are equal. The reason for doing so is that they support the blasphemous arrogance of the critics and reformers and generally tear the comfortable whole cloth made from responses to major war. What cannot be admitted is that there is disjunction between the logic and reason integral to International Relations (and its concomitant, Strategic Studies), International Law, and International Ethics, and the actual responses made over more than a century.

Expressed another way, if the reason and logic of International Relations and Strategic Studies is absent, or only partly present in the responses, then the responses are made on the basis of other guidance, which, of course, may possess its own, but quite different reason and logic. In the following pages uncovering this form of thinking and acting will be the task. Two related questions will be asked in this: why, in the light of abundant and repetitive evidence that Australia and New Zealand’s responses to major wars have been defeats and only qualified victories, do the respective governments make the same decisions; and what is required of the respective mainstream narratives so that it can not only support, but inspire these decisions in the public mind? What becomes apparent over time is that the nature and style of the reasons adduced are a form of apologetics – a disciplined defence of the alliance based on evidence, Christian theology, natural theology, philosophy, and faith against critics, coupled with an advocacy of the alliance for those not yet within it. Within alliance apologetics there is also an attempted philosophical reconciliation that argues for the rationality of the faith invested in it; the more aware apologists even concede a sense of guilt for wrongs acts committed in its name and therefore imply a plea for forgiveness on the basis that it remains the optimum arrangement. Although apologetics have their origin in Classical Greece, the term and its practices are pronounced throughout the works of the early Christian writers. Unsurprisingly, alliance apologetics in this sense are naturally and closely related to the practice of alliance exegesis – by way of providing critical explanations and interpretations of all texts relating to it.

Although exegesis attends all fundamental religious texts (and has a secular variant as well), it is closely identified with the Christian Bible and it

 

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is that which deserves mention. To the core alliance texts, history, agreements, and arrangements the principle of sensus plenior applies:25 they are believed to possess a fuller sense, or deeper meaning than both the original historical occurrences and the actors and authors could have known at the time. To this extent Alliance exegetes are hostile to historical-critical methods of understanding them; indeed, in the light of this opposition, they appear to exist on a spectrum somewhere between revelation and providential intervention. A habit of mind and action is thus constituted requiring inexhaustible deposits of faith, and capable of an extraordinary range of arbitrary absolutions and indulgences for crimes and atrocities committed against adversaries and enemies, actual, potential, or merely presumed. In sum, both the Alliance, and the Empire before it, were Lutheran Instruments of Redemption against isolation, uncertainty, and vulnerability (also actual, potential or merely presumed). Explaining the Responses to Major War Through International Relations The literature on this comprises a disciplinary congested district, which is not to say that all of it, or even most of it, is enlightening. That said, the very best of it provides very useful explanatory insights for part of the phenomena but definitely not all of it. A recent attempt by Richard Ned Lebow goes some way towards addressing this but notwithstanding his inclusive, constructivist approach, still leaves more to be desired. This, it must be admitted is the result of the authors of this paper being persuaded that, until IR becomes even more inclusive the profound insights available from other disciplines and discourses, it will continue to provide analyses that are frustrating and wanting. To explain, albeit injuriously and briefly, Lebow’s Why Nations Fight is truly deserving the status of a seminal work. 26 His analysis rejects the traditional wisdom that the amassing of power for the purpose of achieving security in favour of centralising honour (or esteem) and standing as the subjective and sufficient determinants of foreign and security policy                                                                                                                25 sensus plenior: Latin term which in English means “fuller sense.” 26 Richard Ned Lebow, Why Nations Fight: Past and Future Motives for War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), hereafter cited as Lebow, Why Nations Fight.

 

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objectives (which perforce include the decisions to go to war).27 The pursuit of standing – defined as both competitive achievement and being hailed as a valued partner or member on the basis of excellence in certain activities - by his analysis, is the leading cause of war and accounts for approximately 60 percent of the motivation for war; the traditional IR realist motivation of security for less than 20 percent.28 Of extraordinary relevance to Australia and New Zealand are the findings that:

Small and great powers often fail to undertake anything approaching a rational cost calculus before provoking or starting wars and Lebow documents the irrationality of decision making in numerous case studies. Actors, decision-makers, political leaders are frequently motivated by the drive for self-esteem which leads them to seek standing or revenge directly, or vicariously, through various political arrangements without undertaking a thoughtful assessment of the risks involved with this behavior. Momentary passion, or what are termed irrational emotions or drives not empirically justifiable, but which are psychologically comforting, are neither abnormal nor, paradoxically, “irrational” because they arise from the different logics of rationality found in the pursuit of standing.29

Consistent with these, the conclusion follows that any understanding of modern war requires, first, an understanding of the societies that fight them. 30 Edward Rhodes critique of Why Nations Fight is alive to this, especially through the concept of national identity (which Lebow rejects because, for him, it is “a pure social construction . . . [which] . . . is all but

                                                                                                               27 It is helpful to see Lebow’s work in the context of the debate it has engendered among prominent IR scholars and three such responses which the authors found to be very interesting are cited here for that purpose, and all are to be found in the Security Studies, 21: 2012: Robert Jervis, “Fighting for Standing or Standing to Fight,” pp. 336-344; Richard K. Betts, “Strong Arguments, Weak Evidence,” pp. 345-351; Edward Rhodes, “Why Nations Fight: Spirit, Identity, and Imagined Community,” pp. 352-361 (hereafter cited as Rhodes, ”Spirit, Identity, and Imagined Community”). Lebow’s response to these critics is also published in the same volume and is cited below. 28 Lebow, Why Nations Fight, pp. 97-127. 29 Richard Ned Lebow, “The Causes of War: A Reply to My Critics,” Security Studies, 21: 2012, 365-366 (hereafter cited as Lebow, “A Reply to My Critics,”). 30 Ibid, p. 366.

 

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useless analytically.”31 Given that standing, esteem, and honour are also social constructions, and given also that a high priority must be accorded the need to understand the societies given to modern war, this is a disappointing and frustrating refusal of Rhodes’ cogent proposal. He outlines five different, but in many ways interrelated methods that nations adopt in defining themselves: blood, religion (which allows for the concept of Civil Religion) or ideology, language, culture, and civic identification. 32 Curiously, for the writers of this paper anyway, there is no mention anywhere of important and relevant work outside of, but extremely pertinent to International Relations’ preoccupation with the causes of war. It is this blindness that justifies a traverse beyond the discipline and the contribution canvassed above to the insights offered elsewhere, including explorations, analyses, and discussions under the rubric of what is commonly referred to as political theology.

Nation State, Civil Religion, and Blood Sacrifice

If traditionally we understand the nation-state as the “legitimized

exercise of force over territorial boundaries within which a population has been pacified,” then, because nations frequently lack “the commonality of sentiment shared by members of a language group, ethnicity, or living space,” the fundamental commonality is actually “the shared memory of blood sacrifice, periodically renewed.” According to the formulation proposed by Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle, the nation, in these terms, is therefore:

is the memory of the last sacrifice that counts for living believers. Though the sovereign nation, or nation-state, is an agreement about killing rules that compels citizens to sacrifice themselves for the group, the felt nation makes them want to. The creation of sentiments strong enough to hold the group together periodically requires the willing deaths of a significant portion of its members. The lifeblood of these members is shed by means of a ritual . . . [and] the most powerful enactment of this ritual is war. . . . [which]

                                                                                                               31 Rhodes, ”Spirit, Identity, and Imagined Community,” pp. 355-361, and Lebow, “A Reply to My Critics,” p. 366. 32 Rhodes, ”Spirit, Identity, and Imagined Community,” pp. 355-361.

 

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leads us to define the nation as the memory of the last sacrifice.33

For many, those of a modernist cast of mind especially, this is nothing

less than a form of servile idolatry, but that is to miss the point about the existential shortcomings of modernity, and the perils of religion. Foremost among the former, is the desire to see an ordered universe and certainly not one that is monstrously indifferent to humanity. This need, which social scientists so often deny, President Eisenhower epitomised in 1952 with the statement: “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply religious faith - and I don’t care what it is.” And he was only repeating in the most generalised way what scholars sensitive to both history and modernist anxieties had affirmed before and since. Some form of system of belief is essential in order to effect: (1) a justification and consolation for the most wrenching human tragedies, especially mortality; (2) a guide to one’s dignity of place and meaning in the cosmos, especially in view of personal inadequacy and the need for expiation; and (3) a primary bond of social cohesion expressed in rituals or ceremonies that connect human beings to each and the sacred.34

Such a system is not necessarily a sectarian faith, or even theological; indeed, it might be independent of them, or it might be reinforced by them, but, as Peter Berger reminds us, in the final analysis, it does depend on the “credibility of the banners it puts in the hands of me as they stand before death, or more accurately, as they walk, inevitably toward it.”35 If the nuances to it identified by Clifford Geertz are incorporated – namely, that the system will be symbolically coherent, potent and long-lasting in the unique but nevertheless realistic motivations it creates, and conceptually relevant (with an apparent empirical basis) to the order of existence it relates to36 –

                                                                                                               33 Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 3-5 (hereafter cited as Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation). 34 George A. Kelly, Politics and Religious Consciousness in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1984), p. 11, as cited in Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation, p. 16. 35 Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), p. 43, as cited in Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation, p. 1. 36 Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System, “ in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 90, as cited in Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation, p. 18.  

 

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then patriotism and its synonym, nationalism, is a religion, but, notably, a Civil Religion, which “determines who may kill and what for, how boundaries are formed, and what national identity is.”37

As for the latter, what Marvin and Ingle refer to as the “violent character of genuine religion,”38 it is no more than a reminder of the warning found in Lucretius: tantum religiō potuit suādēre malōrum (the practice of religion leads people to practice evil).39 That being so, it is then appropriate to ask what, ultimately, this might involve to the extent that it requires a distinctive form of thinking and acting at a deep human level. Notwithstanding the warning, two immediate requirements are apparent. The first is that the god of the civil religion is exactly that – the God. Where Christianity overlays the civil religion, or is informed by it in manifold ways, the latter, too, is monotheistic, a conceptual inheritance essentially from Judaism.40 In the history of the nation state this has been the dominant relationship and allows for the proclamation that the God in question, is definitive: “the one true supreme God” of Christianity’s founding as the new Israel, whose historical advent Richard Tarnas recalls:

[He was] the Maker of the universe, the Lord of history, the omniscient King of Kings whose unequalled reality and power justly commanded the allegiance of all nations and all mankind. In the history of the people of Israel, that God had entered decisively into the world, spoken his Word through the prophets, and called forth humanity to its divine destiny; what would be born of Israel would have world-historic significance.41

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              37 Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation, p. 11. 38 Ibid, p. 10. 39 De Rerum Natura, Book I, 101. 40 Christianity is not alone in over-determining the civil religion and other faiths can be cited in relation to the same phenomenon – for example, Islam, and the official description of some countries as “Islamic Republics.” 41 Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View (New York: Ballantine Book, 1991), pp. 97 and 104 (hereafter cited as Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind).

 

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In sum, this is an exclusive God, the worship of whom bestows exclusive truths and exclusive knowledge, the benefit of which is the resolution of all the claims resulting from pre-Christian religious pluralism if, and only if, He is recognised as the “authentic source of salvation.” Indeed, where pluralism in race, class, and creed, had created rootless and dispossessed populations, promise was to hand:

Christianity offered mankind a universal home, and enduring community, and a clearly defined way of life, all of which possessed a scriptural and institutional guarantee of cosmic validity.42

What might seem to twenty-first century mainstream Christian believers in the modern West a reasonable and even obvious transition is in fact the adoption and naturalization of a form of violence against the conscience. Because Christian monotheism defines itself so exclusively, it is commanded to reject and repudiate all other gods and their concomitant religions, which, again by definition, are false; it becomes, therefore, a “means of intercultural estrangement.” Essentially, at this level of division, and in the practice of the civil religion, the distinction is between Christian truth and pagan idolatory - the idolatrous and the true , along the basic lines of what the Egyptologist and religion scholar, Jan Assmann, defines as the “Mosaic distinction” - and the inherent intolerance of belief systems which give “meaning, identity, and orientation to non-Christian others. 43 In this world devoid of mutual respect, but rather, full of conflict and violence, the reality is an historical ethic of “live and let die.”44 The death of belief in false gods can be effected, however, by ouright recognition of them, or by deep and genuine gestures which indicate a conversion process, but, one way or the other,                                                                                                                42 Ibid, p.110. 43 Thomas Hollweck, “The God Question: Jan Assmann’s ‘The Mosaic Distinction’ and the Return of the Repressed,” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Hilton Chicago and Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Ill., 2 September 2004. Paper accessed at: http://www.allacademic.com/one/apsa/apsa04/index.php?click_key=1, 28 October 2009. Note: While Assmann logically extends the process of differentiation he identifies into Christianity itself and points to the religious strife caused by it, the concern in the current context of civil religion is its basic Christian – non-Christian propensity which is frequently in evidence in American history. At the appropriate time in the analysis which follow, however, attention will turn to its operation within American Christianities. 44 Wouter Hanegraaff, “Idolatry,” Revista de Estudos da Religião, No 4 / 2005 / 81, accessed at http://www.pucsp.br/rever/rv4_2005/p_hanegraaff.pdf, 28 October 2009.

 

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recognition is mandatory. And it is a reciprocal arrangement: as the convereted recognise the truth, so too, are they recognised. The choice is stark and precludes agnosticism, indifference to religion and bona fide adherence to the old ways. Thus, not to recognise the civil religion is to grievously offend the covenant with the nation because it entails a refusal to subscibe to the minimum illusion which legitimates sacrifice. Or, to phrase it another way, to decide on being an outcast from what might be termed the nation’s security culture. Security culture in this context, is a particular adaption which relies upon Raymond Williams’ attempt to define culture in general as a metaphorical construct representing “a complex argument about ther relations between general human development and a particular way of life, and between both the works and the practices of art and intelligence.” It is, therefore, “formed by perceptions, intentions and acts” which will give rise to creations which are socially reified.45 Both security culture and national identity, in this light, are constructions and intertwined; more than this, they are privileged constructions which establish an orthodoxy which, contrary to the old Qauker mission, speaks social, political and economic power to truth. By extension, the practices which follow from them, urged and provoked by the imperatives of security culture, are not necessarily justified by that culture, but by interests veiled by it. Security, for its part, is inseparable from that other nation-state invocation – the national, or vital interest – and both enjoy all the benefits that obfuscation brings to justifications for the use of force in politics. Where once national and alliance debate concerned defence, and thus, the ability to withstand an attack by a known, territorial rival or enemy, the move to the portmanteau term, security, enabled and then encouraged the proliferation of anxieties concerning every aspect of life, and thus of so-called national security budgets to allay them. Too little thought and no little credence was given to the possibility that, even in the absence of enemies, the human condition for the great majority of people might still be, for a host of reasons, one of uncertainty, fear, and at best only fleeting happiness. Psychology                                                                                                                45 Raymond Williams, Keywords, pp. 76-82, as cited in Richard Slotkin, Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (New York: Harper-Perennial, 1994), pp. 21-23 (hereafter cited as Slotkin, Fatal Environment).

 

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nevertheless had its victory and national security is now thought to include at least strategic, social, political, economic, ethnic, ideoplogical, religious, and gender security where security seems to be, in a phrase, a sense of perpetual well-being. More accutately this describes an impossible state of clarity, invulnerability and immortality.

In turn, anything which is thought to bring about this desirable state of affairs is in the national interest; indeed, is a vital interest, unchallengeable and supreme. But here the absurdity of the situation overflows: the constant and cheap supply of Middle Eastern and African oil, the deterioration of living standards in the First World; the immiseration of whole populations in the Third World; the commodification of basic needs such as health, education, and water; the political complexion of democratically-elected Latin American governments; the insistence that microstates in the Southwest Pacific neo-liberalise their economies, and decisions of national governments to set their own foreign exchange rates are all examples of what is now included in the schedule of national interests by so many countries. At no stage in the articulation of national security is it thought germaine to ask just how this state of affairs was brought about, at what cost, and why, and under what conditions is should continue. Instead, what so often reigns is a subtefuge, as Simone Weil wrote some seventy years ago: What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Gasoline is much more likely than what to be a cause of international conflict.”46 The immediate requirement of this arrangement is that national narratives and discussions of war have to be privileged. Discourse in this context accords with the brief definition of “rule-goverened knowledge: as Graeme Turner has argued, certain texts are “elected” on the grounds of bearing witness to those dominant, or “preferred meanings” which establish an apparently transparent, unmediated historical reality when, inescapably, they are transformation.47 Notwithstanding contending narratives, usually at

                                                                                                               46 R. Z. Sheppard, ‘The Hunger Artist,” a review of Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life (Pantheon, 1976), Time, 10 January 1977, p. 54. 47 Graeme Turner, National Fictions: Literature, Film, and the Construction of Australian Narrative (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986), pp. 6-9 and 107 (hereafter cited as Turner, National Fictions).

 

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the margins, the dominant discourse is by definition consensually agreed at the popular level and care is taken to ensure that, as befits a cutom made garment of singular importance based on myth, fraying seams are reinforced and loose threads removed by whatever means are available. This is discourse in action: the deliberate forgetting of social and political events, aided and abetted by those whose interests are served by the persistent evasion of reality, so as to constitute a security culture funadamentalism of noxious certitude and consoling balm against uncertainty and angst, for the credulous. The resulting state of mind denies paradox and ambiguity and borders on, where it does not spill over, into a fascist certainty which insists, inter alia, “that the death of our own does not originate with outselves . . . [but] is a reluctant respons to violence that originates beyond group borders, that is, with others.”48 In a phrase, this is a sacralising project, but that which is sacred extends beyond the Divine Being, and the sacraments of Christian faith, to “objects and phases of life to which the special reverence arising from religions in general.”49 For Emile Durkheim this comprised the contruction of a “totem system,” defined contemporaneously as a “symbolically coherent, deeply primitive, powerfully religious enterprise organized around a violent identity-crystallizing mechanism.” The totem itself is both the emblem of the state’s agreement to be a state, and the foundation of the national security identity.50 In Durkheim’s words: “It is at once the the symbol of the God and of the society.”51

Exactly what it is is depends on the particular history of the nation-state in question but the popular undertsandings of beliefs, flags, events, places and personages are naturally to the fore. In each and every case they may only be approached but never fully comprehended; they are ultimately “unknowable, untouchable, and unviewable,” but, under certain conditions,

                                                                                                               48 Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation, p. 12. 49 Warner, The Living and the Dead, p. 5. 50 Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation, p. 1 and 11. 51 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, translated by Joseph W. Swain (George Allen & Unwin, 1915; New York: Free Press), p. 206, as cited in Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation, p. 10-11.

 

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they effect consubstantiation whereby the totem’s power is transferred to other persons and things so that they, too, enjoy its holy status. As Marvin and Ingle remind us: “It is not like religion; it is religion.” 52 And, as argued by Mary Douglas, the greatest respect that is paid it is the self-delusion that it is not a social and political construct but something independent of its creators’ understanding of it, a thing with an autonomous existence. Thus embraced, the nation is a perpetual communicant with the totem and, should it be threatened, or worse, defeated, great restorative sacrifice will be required to prevent its extinction.53 It is no exaggerration to say that this woiuld be experienced literally as “the death of God.”

Civil Religion and The Cult of the Dead: the General Case

By way of a philosophical gathering to this point, the relevant facts with I propose to start with here as undeniable are: [1] that civilization itself is founded on violence; [2] that political collectivities which emphasis self-interest and collective egoism are inherently brutal; [3] that “a nation is a group of people united by a common mistake regarding its origins and a collective hostility towards its neighbours;” [4] that nationalism is, ultimately, a “community of blood;” [5] that we are all embedded in violence and, to a greater or lesser extent, benefit from it, and [6] that “government is impossible without a religion – that is, without a body of common assumptions.”54 These

                                                                                                                52 Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation, p. 31 and 39. 53 Mary Douglas, Implicit Meanings (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1975), p. xiv, as cited in Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation, p. 39; also pp. 26-38. 54 Although I assume these six features, they are not at all arbitrarily or capriciously chosen and for those wanting assurance through references to external works I have added the following: [1] accords with – indeed, is derived from Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribner, 1932), p. xi, and I am deeply grateful to Dr. Daniel Warner, formerly of the Graduate Institute of International Studies, and now Assistant Director for International Relations at the Geneva Centre for Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) for bringing it to my attention in a series of extraordinarily valuable, ongoing conversations in Geneva in August 2011 on the subject of humanitarianism and the tragic in the context of his research into, and analysis of the historical, political and theological contexts of the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross. See: Daniel Warner, “Henri Dunant’s Imagined Community: Humanitarianism and the Tragic,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 38 (1, 2013): 3-28, and http://alt.sagepub.com.virtual.anu.edu.au/content/38/1/3.full.pdf+html, accessed 28 January 2015. [1], [3], [4] and [5] are extracted from one of the principal sources for this paper: Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 15, 27, and 312-313 (hereafter cited as Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation). [6], which expresses what to this writer is a significant truth is more accurately a direct quote from George Bernard Shaw, “Preface,” Androcles and the Lion Overruled (New York:  

 

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underlie a search for, and an elaboration of that which is at the core of security culture – namely the methods by which a nation’s security is pursued and achieved through requiring its citizens to fight, kill, and perhaps, to die. Foreign and defence policy may be politely, if disingenuously configured in monetary terms but the reserve currency of a nation is always its people; more precisely, it is the number and quality of disposable bodies it possesses.

It is not an exaggeration, therefore, to align the theory and practice of security culture with William Lloyd Warner’s “Cult of the Dead” via, in the first instance, the suspecting glance he extends in the direction of the Christian liturgies of Easter and Holy Week. Notwithstanding the promise of eternal life after death which these celebrate, he questions the need for “continually remembering and re-enacting the great tragedy that their God was made to suffer when he was on earth,” and concludes that the promise is but part of a larger explanation. Those that are emotionally satisfied by this “terror-filled drama” he proposes:

not only receive vicarious satisfaction from his tragedy but, because they also unconsciously identify with the killers, can express their deep hatred of, and their desire to kill, their brothers and other members of the Christian human collectivities. Moreover, their hatred is directed against themselves and what they are as moral beings. . . by self-righteously loving their God and killing him, they can hate others and themselves and, through ritual usage, identify first with the hated human figures and later with the loved and valued God to forgive themselves for their hatreds and efficaciously release their feelings of guilt and self-condemnation.55

Where the deadly consequences of war in pursuit of national security

are concerned, the ritual usage which becomes ritual forgiveness, according to Warner, is best observed on days of national commemoration such as, in the United States, Memorial Day, but the derived lessons are portable. The day itself “is a cult of the dead which organizes and integrates the various faiths and ethnic and class groups into a sacred unity.” Moreover, “its principle                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              Brentano’s 1923) p. 25. [3] originates with Karl W. Deutsch, but Shlomo Sands opens his study of Jewish nationalism with it: see When and How the Jewish People Was Invented (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2008), p. 11. 55 William Lloyd Warner, The Living and the Dead: A Study of the Symbolic Life of Americans (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1959), pp. 426-427 (hereafter cited as Warner, The Living and the Dead).

 

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themes are those of the sacrifice of the soldier dead for the living and the obligation of the living to sacrifice their individual purposes for the good of the group so that they, too, can perform their spiritual obligations.” In the final analysis, “the anxieties man has about death are confronted with a system of sacred beliefs about death which give the individuals involved and the collectivity of individuals a feeling of well-being.”56 At play here is IR’s disciplined amnesia: consider, the famous frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan – a foundational text for IR Realists is this:

It depicts the head and torso of a mustachioed man with long hair, wearing a crown, whose arms are outstretched seemingly in a form of welcoming embrace. Close examination reveals that the man’s torso and arms are composed of tiny individual people, crowded together each looking to the head of the Leviathan. Its significance is reprised in “Obedience as Desire:”

                                                                                                               56 Warner, The Living and the Dead, pp. 248-249.

 

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1. Our relationship to “society” is psychosomatic: imagining our own

body as bound to the sovereign’s body. 2. Attachment seeks power: fusion of one’s own body with a body

imagined to be omnipotent. 3. “Obedience” is the price: inability to resist the sovereigns will. 4. A “docile body” is one that imagines itself as physically bound to the

sovereign’s body (politic).57

And it thrives, if somewhat ironically or paradoxically, where the writ of Modernity is thought to have dispelled such primitivism, as Stephen Greenblatt’s review of Michael Rogin’s ‘Ronald Reagan,’ the Movie brings to our attention:

Rogin suggests that President Reagan, like Nixon before him, has skilfully exploited a still more venerable matrix of political symbolism, the association of the leader’s physical body with the health of the nation. This association, which Rogin traces back to the late Medieval doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies, has been turned to novel use through the publicity machine that has been Reagan’s hallmark: the state is merged with the President’s body but the President’s body becomes a media event, a Hollywood fantasy. Even Reagan’s intestinal polyps were given elaborate media treatment, with the publication of the detailed results of the Presidential proctoscopy and television coverage (complete with animated diagrams) of his illness and recuperation from surgery. Vice-President Bush, always eager to emulate his hero, has released for publication the results of his most recent rectal examination, duly printed in the New York Times. The American public needs to be reassured that the country will be governed for another four years by a healthy asshole.58

As profane as this may be against the religious identity of the nation it

is, as Paul Kahn and others have observed, nothing less than the atavistic return of the “the people” as the “mystical body of Christ” – a transformation

                                                                                                               57 “Obedience as Desire,” Library of Social Science, http://blog.libraryofsocialscience.com/obedience-as-desire/ accessed 26 January 2015. 58 Stephen Greenblatt, “That’s America,” review of Michael Rogin, ‘Ronald Reagan’, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (University of California Press, 1988), London Review of Books, 10 (17, 29 September 1988):8, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v10/n17/stephen-greenblatt/thats-america accessed 26 January 2015.

 

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wherein the will of the people supplants the monarch and assumes the status of the mystical corpus of the state.59 It is not a body politic to be slighted, opposed, dissented from, or accused of irrationality in its decisions and purposes. Given this, and where security is at stake, the instinctive question: security - from what, for whom, to protect what, and by what means? Is repressed. The very concept is Orwellian in these terms? Which begs another question, posed by Honi Fern Haber, who asks whether this is just a case of terroristic structures masquerading as security?60

Civil Religion and The Cult of the Dead: DownUnder

Throughout the 20th Century and the 21st Century to date Australian, and to a lesser extent, New Zealand, political leaders have defined their respective country's roles as analogous to that of Paladin - one of the legendary twelve peers of Charlemagne's court. Accordingly, they have engaged in many of the great conflicts of the period to date; indeed, in Australia, governments have been so enthusiastic to do so that the leadership on at least two occasions deceived the country as to the nature and quality of the requests. In peacetime, too, the same willingness to contribute to British Imperial or Western Alliance postures has been evident. In all cases, however, this disposition involves a willingness to defend interests that are, in an essential sense, vicariously defined, yet the serious consequences or costs which are immediately experienced are never fully admitted to the mainstream debate on national security options. It is therefore, instructive, to look back for outstanding themes upon the last 101 years of the countries international history. In doing so a fundamental consistency is identified - that Australia and New Zealand, in the pursuit of their security, has indulged itself and committed excesses, repeatedly and in the same way, from generation to generation. The security they seek, moreover, has proved elusive, never being regarded as adequate, yet the anguish the search occasions, generation to generation, is stifled and avoided, as are attempts to suggest that the record of failure and destruction need to be acknowledged in full measure.

                                                                                                               59 Excerpt from, Paul W. Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place (Princeton University Press, 2014), Library of Social Science, http://libraryofsocialscience.com/reviews/ 22 July 2014, accessed 24 July 2014. 60 Honi Fern Haber, Beyond Postmodern Politics: Lyotard, Rorty, Foucault (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 115.

 

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Even in a world, to use Yeat's phrase, "grown brutal by the fare" of total war, the balance of terror and nuclear deterrence (and the catastrophic consequences should it fail) nation states are held to commit no more than "injustices61" even where ethical standards are invoked. From time to time, certainly, there is a suggestion that something other and stronger is required but it takes a Hitler or a Stalin to provide the animus, and only then, when they outrage understandings or 'rules of the game' wrought by realpolitik or balance-of-power politics. Between times, and short of holocausts and "killing fields," 9/11 and the emergence of Islamic State, the language of analysis succumbs to what the Atlantic Monthly once described as the 'necessity for euphemism.' Whether this arises because, as the Japanese maxim has it "war is the art of embellishing death" or, more simply, out of the simple idea that "man can only take a certain amount of terror" is for the moment unclear. It might even be as Paul Virilio suggests:

To paraphrase Kipling, one might say that the concept of reality is always the first victim of war.62

Such is the triumph of IR realism, an outlook well captured by Paul Berman when he writes that such people, in the face of bizarre and shocking events around the world, profess not to be surprised because they reflect the essential nature of world politics.63 If it is, then international relations as political practice, and International Relations as a field of inquiry are misconceived and misnamed. According to the schedules of 20th Century “democide” compiled by Rudolph J. Rummel, government actions – not in wars exclusively - accounted for the deaths of 262 million people.64 In wars, Michael Vlahos posits a figure in excess of 150 million in the 37 years 1914-1951, while Zbigniew Brzezinski’s category of “lives deliberately distinguished by politically motivated

                                                                                                                62 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso, 1989), p.33 (hereafter cited as Virilio, War and Cinema). 63 Paul Berman, as cited in Richard A. Koenigsberg, “The Delusion of Rationality: reflections on Terror and Liberalism,” Library of Social Science, http://blog.libraryofsocialscience.com/the-delusion-of-rationality/ accessed 26 January 2015. 64 Rudolph J. Rummel, “20th Century Democide, ”available at: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM, accessed 26 January 2015.

 

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carnage,” estimates 167 million – 175 million in the period to the early 1990s.65 To this phenomenon he ascribes the term “the politics of organized insanity,” a turn which confronts the ostensible rationality of war with a counter-claim that it is, rather, in whole or significant part, a form of collective psychopathology requiring, in Richard Koenigsberg’s terminology, “masochistic submission.”66 One consequence of this servitude of concept, language and politics to fantasy is, naturally, a muting of the difference between (say) injustice and evil, between those actions by states that might be remedied, and those that, in a human sense, can never be. The latter category is perhaps, better understood as including actions so terrible in their dimensions and so beyond restoration that they can only be redeemed.67 And in modernity, who or what is to do that? A second consequence is that which flows from the principle that what is unsaid is unimportant in conjunction with another principle, namely, that preposterous statements made appealingly will, for many, make reality captive and assume the status of rational. Essentially this is the fusion between (intentional or unintentional) forgetting and propaganda. The literature in which the debate over security policies in Australia and New Zealand has taken place is rich in the products outlined above. In the context of the conventional wars in which the two countries have fought, the unsaid, and its antonym on this occasion, the euphemism is profoundly disturbing. From the countless inscriptions, epitaphs and speeches which proclaim the country's gratitude to those who "gave their lives" in a particular conflict to the gates of the great British memorial at Thiepval, the Somme, where 73,000 soldiers of the Great War are classified as "missing," the representation of what took place is a lie. In general terms, the deceased did not give their lives voluntaristically; they had it taken from them arbitrarily and violently. Moreover, those that are "missing" are missing because

                                                                                                               65 Michael Vlahos, “Rites of Spring: Sacrifice, Incarnation, and War,” Library of Social Science, http://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/essays/vlahos-rites.html, accessed 26 January 2015, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century (Easton, 1993), as cited in “Necrometrics: Estimated Totals for the Entire 20th Century,” http://necrometrics.com/all20c.htm, accessed 25 January 2015. 66 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as cited in Richard Koenigsberg, “Political Violence as Collective Psychopathology, http://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/essays/koenigsberg-political-violence.html, accessed 26 January 2015. 67 I am grateful here to a paper by the late Professor Arthur Lee Burns, "Injustice and Evil in the Politics of the Powers" for the light it throws upon the distinction and also for the encouragement it gave me to write in the manner this paper is presented.

 

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nothing remained of them to be found:68 thirty years before the atom bombs turned the very ground into a photo-sensitive plate, and so recorded the last nano-second of many people's existence, thousands of tons of high explosives shells on the Western front were de-realising people in similar numbers as were exterminated in Hiroshima. And yet the obscenity of euphemising it all is permitted, and persists. At the atomic, and now the nuclear level of the debate the situation is no different. The language of nuclear war, replete with its Orwellian corruption of thought and expression, has been adopted in Australia - not, let it be said, faute de mieux, but with gusto by the "strategic studies community". At the same time, this community, if that is what it is, has so far failed to write/publish a single article, let alone a monograph reflecting on its own language, and with the exception of Arthur Lee Burns' seminal study, Ethics and Deterrence (1970) it has allowed twenty years to pass without a further contribution on that subject.69 The need to counter these silences is, of course, almost self-evident. Indeed, in recognition of this John Keegan's The Face of Battle was a timely attempt to construct "the point of maximum danger" for a readership blissfully ignorant of the realities of battle.70 In Australia, the attempt by Robin Gerster took a different tack by exploding the myths of war-writing. But Big-Noting, while clearly significant intellectually, is something of a late corrective against the national literary habit of heroising the 'Digger" by creating myth and false consciousness via "beautiful", consoling lies.716 It, like Keegan's work, stands almost in isolation against a torrent of unreality. Traditionally, this has taken the form of crude censorship and denial - as witness the Returned Services League's attempt to have banned such 'nauseating muck" as Robert Graves's "Goodbye to all that.”72 Here the poet (apostate) was met with the full fury that an established church

                                                                                                               68 For this and related matters see John Laffin, British Butchers and Bunglers of World War One (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1989), exp. p.5. 69 Arthur Lee Burns, Ethics and Deterrence: A Nuclear Balance Without Hostage Cities, Adelphi Papers No. 69, July 1970. The subsequent contribution is to be a symposium prior to the September 1990 Australian Political Studies Association Conference in Tasmania. 70 5 John Keegan, The Face of Battle (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976). 71 Robin Gerster, Big-Noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1987), hereafter cited as Gerster, Big-Noting; see also Peter Pierce, "Exploding the Myths of War", a review of Big-Noting, The Age, 9 April 1988 (hereafter cited as Pierce, Reviews of Big-Noting). 72 Gerster, Big-Noting, p.118.

 

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reserves for that which it declares to be anathema. Alternatively, and in these times more likely, its manifestation is a grand licentiousness, of which a recent, double-page advertisement in Defense News is the apotheosis: on two black pages simulating night, but illuminated by lasers of many colours simulating incendiaries and other exploding devices, the Loral defense electronics company proclaims:

Today's military training has enough realism to make your hands sweat - thanks to over $650 million worth of laser-based MILES equipment delivered by Loral. Not just an automatic record of hits and misses. But the bang, the flash and the "feel" of battlefield experience, too. Now we're developing MILES II via links to the global positioning satellite, it will track every weapon in a simulated battle - simultaneously and in real time - including high angle fire, and helicopter gunships. It can even play back an entire exercise to commanders afterwards.73

But the true absurdity of this message is only to be found in the words of the heading that frames the advertisement below it - COMBAT WITHOUT CASUALTIES.74 In the denial of memory and fact of which these example attest to, two consequences would appear to follow. In the first instance the evil that is war is desensitized, robbed of its sting, so to speak. Even the Holocaust can be de-natured or expunged. And it was, of course, under attack from the earliest post-world War II years, as the following statement made by Isser Harel, onetime Chief of Mossad, points to:

After the creation of the Jewish state in May 1948, the search for Eichmann was one of the main objectives of the Israeli State Services because he was responsible for the fate of our six million dead . . . this was all the more imperative in that the Nuremberg trials, for reasons of foreign policy, had carefully avoided any talk of Jewish genocide: French, Poles, Hungarians, etc. had been exterminated in the concentration camps, but nowhere was it mentioned that a great majority of them were Jews.75

                                                                                                               73 Defence News, 19 February 1990, pp.10-11. 74 ibid. 75 Virilio, War and Cinema, p.32.

 

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In the second, and consequentially, war and its atrocities become that much easier to commit and to engage in repeatedly. But this is no Buddhist cycle in which the actors are faced with a universe of imperfection from which it is possible to escape only through a series of relentless and repetitive purgings in a long series of existences. On the contrary, this is damnation - at least it is if damnation is defined as an eternal punishment that consists in repeating forever one's initial indulgences and excesses.76 That, in Australia's case, these were committed in the name of "security" does not redeem the acts in question. Once again (and apart from the problematic nature of what redemption would mean), and to the contrary, they illustrate that the "security" which the Australasian nations have pursued was never, even initially, conceived in terms deserving such a status. Nevertheless, at each turn the concept of "security" was assumed or borrowed successively from Great Powers, entailed evils induced by Great Power conflicts, and always inexorably so. This, it is argued, is the fundamental consistency that identifies both traditional and contemporary Australasian security policy and the casts of mind associated with it. Australia, New Zealand, War, and the Pursuit of Security Australia is not a modest country. When the Review of Australia's Defence Capabilities, undertaken by Paul Dibb, was released in 1986, the responsible Minister proclaimed that the country's "area of direct military interest" covers around 10% of the earth's surface. As Defence Minister, Kim C. Beazley, put it in 1985, then, this involved "distances equal to those between Sweden and Afghanistan or from Finland to the Suez Canal."77 But this was not the limit of Australia's strategic concerns: the "sphere of primary strategic interest" extends throughout South East Asia, the Eastern Indian Ocean and the South Pacific. In all, this sphere comprises nearly one-quarter

                                                                                                               76 Oliver MacDonagh, "Time's Revenges and Revenge's Time: A View of Anglo Irish Relations", Anglo-Irish Studies IV (1979): 2 (hereafter cited as MacDonagh "Times Revenges etc"). Although the article cited does not relate to the subject matter of this essay, as in so many of this writer's enterprises I find myself inspired by Oliver MacDonagh's work and method of interrogating questions of historical importance and thus bound to express my debts to his work. 77 "Statement by the Minister for Defence on the Review of Defence Capabilities Conducted by Mr. Paul Dibb", 3 June 1986, p.16.

 

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of the surface of the globe.78 At least it is not difficult to agree with Beazley when he dismisses the suggestion that Australia, with a population of only 16 million, was becoming isolationist.79 Besides, even this geographic sweep did not "preclude the possibility of Australian forces being sent further afield,” in either fighting or peacekeeping roles.80 In the end one is left with a wry reflection that Australia, which derives much of its identity from the rejection of its British - imperialist past, was beginning to aspire to nothing more than an aping of that which it wanted rid of. [New Zealand was not immune to global immodesty either: when, in 1965, the Prime Minister, Sir Keith Holyoake, had attempted to justify the country’s decision to commit military forces to the Vietnam War, he cited the “logic of geography,” to which the historian, David McIntyre, responded:

Even Disraeli, who said the "Key of India" was Constantinople, never claimed that the outer defences of the Straits of Dover stretched to the Gulf of Tonkin.81

In this context one can only wonder why the Australian and New Zealand Governments bothered with any delineation at all. Indeed, subsequent events and statements can be read as absolving Australia from any such limitations such has been the proactive and activist bent of all governments. Thus, in December 1988 Kim Beazley, as Minister of Defence, began a major address on "Australia's Defence Policy" with the claim that "Australia is philosophically and strategically only just coming to grips with the end of the post-war era in the Asia - Pacific region."17 He then proceeded to outline the future by conducting a retrospective:

Australia's strategic environment may have more in common with the political map of nineteenth century Europe, with its shifting alliances and multi-polarity than with the situation Australia has faced as an

                                                                                                               78 ibid., pp.16-17. 79 ibid., p.17. 80 ibid. 81 David McIntyre, "The Future of the New Zealand System of Alliances", Landfall, December 1967, p.342. 17 Kim C. Beazley, "Australian Defence Policy", paper presented to the Bicentennial Conference on Australia and the World: Prologue and Prospects, under the aegis of the Strategic and Defence Centre, Australian National University, 6-9 December 1988, p.1.

 

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independent country in the twentieth century.82 If it is borne in mind that the political conditions to which Beazley refers found their most powerful expression in World War I, Australia's most destructive conflict experience in terms of human life, then it could fairly be inferred that the Minister was foreshadowing the futility of imposing any limits. In the age of "chaos theory" it is advisable to remember that the "Butterfly Effect" in its most general formulation militates against all attempts at proscription. Just as, in weather for example, this translates into "the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform systems next month in New York,"83 it is the case that the antics of an "old bitch gone in the teeth" (to use Ezra Pound's denunciation of Europe) or, if a more proximate cause is preferred, the stupidity of a Serbian student were sufficient to catalyse the transformation of the established world order. And, with an eye to Europe's own transformation since Beazley first pronounced on Australia's future, who would confidently gainsay the claim of re-formation and, effectively, the denial of World War I? If it is also borne in mind that Australia, in the period alluded to by Beazley and which by implication extends to 1914, acted in a manner analogous to Paladin - one of the legendary knightly champions of Charlemagne's court (whose popular revival was a comic-strip character of the same name famous for his calling card which informed "Have Gun, Will Travel") there are grounds for asking two questions. The first is whether a "return to the nineteenth century" implied a return to previous policies of military intervention. The second is interdependent with the first; namely, whether there was any departure from well-established, early habits to make a return necessary. In sum it is to embark on an inquiry about the substance, indeed the existence of change in Australian strategic thought and practice. In approaching this question it should be borne in mind that militia recruited from Australia fought in New Zealand against the Maori (1860-72), and a New South Wales continent fought in The Sudan against Muslim militants (1885-86). When Australia was federated on 1 January 1901 the national colonies were each maintaining separate contingents in the Boer War in South Africa (1899-1902) while three of them were also providing forces fighting against the Boxers in China (1900). Pondering Australasian history                                                                                                                82 ibid. 83 James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science Cardinal/Penguin, 1988), p.8.

 

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from 1900, with the country's subsequent involvement in two world wars, the Korean War, the Malayan Emergency, Confrontation / Konfrontasi with Indonesia, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War (Desert Shield / Desert Storm), the extended post 9/11war in Afghanistan, the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent war in the Gulf Iraqi (Operation Iraqi Freedom), and the war now being waged IS / ISIL / Daesh in Iraq and Syria, it is difficult to believe that Australia is a peaceful country. More to the point it is a country so often at war that it is appropriate to ask whether it has been perennially under threat or, failing that, whether it is a perennially aggressive country. To foreshadow what some see as the case against the imputation of aggression, it is conceded that there are occasions on which Australia and / or New Zealand have contributed less to an explicit combat, or a role regarded as being less likely to result in a high incidence of casualties, and more to a support role. Medical team, transport services, and maritime patrol duties qualify under these headings. None of these, it is emphasized, is without danger and all require that the forces committed enter into harm’s way. At the same time the intention is frequently to reconcile the opposition or ambivalence the respective governments have regarding whatever it is that the United States has embarked on with the need to always reassure Washington of the essential fidelity of a subordinate ally. By definition, these decisions are thus always compromises and always represent alliance solidarity regardless of whether the war of the moment is ethical, legal, or even required by the circumstances. Accordingly, an answer is to the question of aggression is, we believe, available from an examination, necessarily brief in this paper, of Australian and New Zealand involvement in two major wars of the last century – World War I and the Vietnam War – and their contribution to strategic initiatives of the West within an alliance with the United States in the post-9/11 period.84 For the purposes of this paper, then, the Cold War and the years since the

                                                                                                               84 Note: World War II, sometimes described as “the good war” has been omitted from this paper as a central focus but not because it is an exception to the general arguments advanced in this paper. Rather, it is mentioned only in passing because the purpose of this paper is to bring to the fore the habits of mind which have attended thinking on war in Australia and New Zealand over the last 100 years by way of World War I, the centenary of which is now; the Vietnam War, which Australia and New Zealand committed to 50 years ago, and the current period, which indicates how little has changed. Accordingly, the claim that World War II must be remembered as a victory of Fascism – something the authors agree on, but with qualifications – there are counter-claims which must be given due respect: among these are consequences which significantly challenge the notions of a “good war” – it’s timing for a start, but also its consequences for Eastern and Central Europe in particular, global politics and economics, and weapons developments just to name a few. And repressed memories of the type discussed above are no less frequent.

 

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1989 are treated as wars similar to those that it is company with, not least for the reason that, in Hobbesian and Grotian terms, they are wartime inasmuch as they are dominated by a disposition to contention and war. Indeed, the post-Cold War age to date has been marked by a pronounced inability of the major powers to think outside of the confined imagination of the previous half-century which. Specifically, the attempt is to ask, why, given the significant record of failure, condescension or betrayal in each conflict, do the two countries maintain a position within the alliance that does not support, let alone promote their national security, and why do the dominant national narratives commemorate these conflicts as worthy of the sacrifice they exacted, and emulation by future generations? This is no more than to question what it is in (for want of a better term) national psyches that blocks learning from experience. Civil Religion and The Cult of the Dead in Practise: Apologetics, Exegesis, and Failure

War and Empire

This approach immediately renders generally problematic the direct security interests of Australia and New Zealand since their two dominant alliance partners have been notable for their involvement in war. As John Brewer illustrates in his paean to the "fiscal-military state," The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1788, the country which colonised Australia and New Zealand at the close of that period was, by any definition, warlike.85 In the 1740s the Royal Navy's shipyard population alone (around 40,000 men) was greater than that of any contemporary British city with the exception of London. It was an establishment easy to understand: of the 127 years that separated the Hundred Years War from the Battle of Waterloo (1688-1815) Britain was at war for more than seventy. And, as Linda Colley observes, this was to be expected:

It was, in the main, exceptionally profitable war. Victories were won; invasions repelled; markets captures; and so many colonies seized that by the 1820s

                                                                                                               85 John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1788 (London: Unwin

Hyman, 1989); see also Linda Colley, "Strong Government", a review of this and two related texts, London Review of Books, 7 December 1989, p.8 (hereafter cited as Colley, "Strong Government").

 

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London controlled, at least in theory, one quarter of the world's population.86

In the subsequent period (1816-1980) Britain fought 19 international wars, or more than one every decade and incurred nearly 1.3 million battle deaths. Put another way, the average intensity of Britain's international wars, measured in soldiers killed, was 24 per cent higher than the total number of US dead in the Vietnam War (68,000 v 55,000) yet the former resulted from wars of an average length of only 22 months.87 Such was the "war-proness" of one of the dominant powers in the international system as it sought to maintain or achieve its position, and such was the belligerent nature of Australasia’s first "protector." World War I, it is frequently asserted, was necessary because Germany was the aggressor and because Australia and New Zealand, as Anglo-Celtic outposts of the British Empire, had direct security interests automatically at stake of them because of their imperial links. At best this is a second order of justification: preeminently, what was at stake in 1914 was the status quo of the European state's system – that is, a system whose continued existence implied the perpetuation of privilege for some and on-going subjugation for many others. It was, in any case, a state system defined by its pathologies - within and between its constituent parts - and deservingly excoriated by Ezra Pound in the lines which asked, after the war, for what cause so many had been killed:

For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization . . .

The history of the Empire for which Australia and New Zealand were so eager to fight had, by 1914 (and much earlier for those paying attention) was a reflection of everything Pound found revolting. It was not only war itself, against rivals and within its colonies, that deserved such opprobrium, it was also the case that Britain had used measures other than war against its colonies which resulted in greater death tolls and social dislocation. Just two will be mentioned: the first is the period of mass starvation, disease and emigration in Ireland between 1845 and 1852, the latter two being consequent                                                                                                                86 Colley, "Strong Government." 87 Melvin Small and J. David Singer, Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1816-1980 (Beverley Hills: Sage, 1982), p.176 (hereafter cited as Small and Singer, Resort to Arms).

 

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upon the first, a famine resulting from an infestation of the potato crop. Because of it, the population of Ireland declined from more than 8.2 million prior to the famine to 6.5 million in the succeeding ten years to 1851. Throughout its duration, Ireland exported food in large quantities – grains in particular, which constituted a cash crop for landowners. The colonial administrator in charge of the administration of government relief, Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan, not only resisted all requests to divert the exports to meet the national emergency, but also limited the Government's food aid programme on the grounds that such measures were contrary to his beliefs - in laissez-faire economics and that "the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson."88 In light of the fact that, in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Irish Catholics, who constituted 80 percent of the population, had been prohibited by the penal laws from purchasing or leasing land, from voting, from holding political office, from living in or within 5 miles of a corporate town, from obtaining education, from entering a profession, and from doing many other things necessary for a person to succeed and prosper in society, the lesson learned by the great majority was that the repeal of the laws in 1829 did not necessarily betoken the British Government’s recognition of them within a common humanity. The second is a similar event, and although it took place after World War I, it nevertheless indicated the impermeability of the Australasian consciousness to evidence that a reexamination of the regard for empire and ostensible security guarantors was imperative. This was the Bengal Famine of 1943-44: for many years the accepted death from it was around 3 million, but recent scholarship has revised this figure upwards, to more than 5 million. As in Ireland nearly a century earlier, India continued to export food that, had it been used to alleviate the famine, up to 2 million lives might have been saved. British efforts to counter the emergency were also inadequate, the necessary foodstuffs being withheld so that Britain itself would no go short and for the forthcoming liberation of Europe. 89 By any estimate this was extraordinary contempt for a colony that that had given so much to its empire: in World War I over one million Indian troops served overseas from what was known as British India of whom at least 74,187 died, and another 67,000 were                                                                                                                88 See Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991). 89 See Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II (Basic Books, 2011).

 

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wounded. At the time of the Bengal Famine, India had provided over 2.5 million soldiers for the war against the Axis Powers and was a base for US operations in support of China against Japan. What John Newsinger calls “Britain’s noxious History of Imperial Warfare” seems never to have registered in Australia and New Zealand as something to escape or evade because, no matter the tribulations it exacted, it never found expression in outright rejection right up until the time that Britain was clearly incapable of securing both countries in the way they thought they deserved and were promised.90 Australia until 1942, and New Zealand until 1947 remained so besotted with the British Empire that the prerogative to declare war remained with Britain. The 1931 Statute of Westminster that enabled their legislative independence from the British Parliament and Government was not adopted on the common grounds, that it might weaken the imperial bonds. Thus, both otherwise independent countries went to war automatically and without consultation by Britain, in both 1914 and 1939. It took the Fall of Singapore for Australia in 1942 to make the move while in New Zealand the opposition to it may be gauged by the argument put forward by a National Party Member of Parliament, Frederick Doidge, who denounced the proposal as “disloyal,” and went on to proclaim, “With us, loyalty is an instinct as deep as religion.”91

The record undoubtedly indicates that a deep faith was a prerequisite. The quality of imperial command for much of the war was so obviously bankrupt that Koenigsberg’s “masochistic submission” is difficult to dismiss unless, of course, it is replaced with the willingness to participate in a “massive episode of collective suicide.” And this is precisely what British General Douglas Haig ordered repeatedly, and in terms that, today, are extremely disconcerting. Upon visiting the battlefield at Verdun on 1 July 1916, his reflected as follows upon a siege that was claiming an average of 6,600 men every day for five months:

Credit must be paid to the splendid young officers who were able time and time again to attack these tremendous positions…. To many it meant certain death, and all must have known that before they started.

                                                                                                               90 John Newsinger, “Britain’s Noxious History of Imperial Warfare,” http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article38721.htm, accessed 7 June 2014. See also, John Newsinger, The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire, new ed. (Bookmarks: 2013). 91 As cited by New Zealand Prime Minister Jim Bolger, “Speech to the Annual Conference of the Newspaper Publishers Association,” 16 March 1994.

 

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Subsequently, he found a speech by the Moghul Emperor Babur to his troops on March 16, 1527 to be “curiously appropriate” and was moved to cite it as he ordered yet another attack of a similar nature:

The most high God has been propitious to us: If we fall in the field, we die the death of martyrs. If we survive, we rise victorious the avengers of the cause of God.92

Little wonder, then, that in World War I, only one-sixth of all

Australian and New Zealand troops were killed because the calibre of command was so appalling that much larger casualties than those incurred would not have been surprising. [And this ratio, representing 60,000 Australians and 16,000 New Zealanders killed in action is quite misleading: research conducted in the 1930s indicated that the Australian death toll had doubled from wounds and illnesses incurred during the war]. 93 Little wonder, too, that, the religion’s presence in the way is reported to have contributed to the breakdown in discipline and the increase in atheism among the New Zealand forces.94 Looking back on the British military leadership between 1914-18 Norman Dixon comments that:

Only the most blinkered could deny that the First World War exemplified every aspect of high-level military incompetence. For sheer lack of imaginative leadership, inept decisions, ignoring military intelligence, under-estimation of the enemy, delusional optimism and monumental wastage of human resources, it has surely never had its equal.95

To concentrate on this aspect of imperial leadership would very likely

carry with it a sense that many died in vain and for this reason it is unlikely to be recalled with any enthusiasm. Even less likely is an assessment based on a

                                                                                                               92 Gerard J. De Groot, Douglas Haig, 1861-1928 (Unwin Hyman: 1988), as cited in “World War I As Collective Suicide,” Library of Social Science, http://archive.benchmarkemail.com/Library-of-Social-Science/newsletter/They-underestimated-the-power-of-the-machine-gun, accessed 28 January 2015. 93 Jonathan Curtis, Parliamentary Library, Parliament of Australia, “To the last man – Australia’s entry to war in 1914,” Research Papers, 2014-2015, 31 July 2014. 94 Nicholas Boyack, Behind the Lines: The Lives of New Zealand Soldiers in the First World War (Wellington: Port Nicholson Press, 1989), p. 197 (hereafter cited as Boyack, Behind the Lines). 95 Norman Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence (London: Jonathon Cape, 1976), p.80.

 

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broader historical sweep that connects the proclaimed victory in World War I with a catalogue of such social, economic, and political transformations of an entirely uneven quality that the following two decades can be regarded as an extended interlude in the war, rather than its postwar. And this description needs to be tempered given the chronically violent reminders in international politics of the ramifications of the Sykes – Picot Agreement of 1916 and the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. These, unfortunately, constitute a realm of general, or at best, widespread ignorance for the great majority who celebrate the ANZAC identity. Only a small minority will associate the occasion with the centenary of the Turkish slaughter of 1.5 million Armenian Christians.96 For them, commemoration is indistinguishable from nationalism and therein lies selective memory. That the courage and sacrifice they honour was worthy of a better cause is not a proposition worthy of a second thought. Even less is the intrusion of evidence that reduces the warrior reputation to the mundane.

Murder and mayhem outside of combat were committed and

notwithstanding that they were exceptions, avoiding the knowledge and understanding of them contributes only to a narrative devoid of the human. Boyack’s investigations of the records document “many” riots and mutinies by New Zealand troops in France and Egypt. According to the same records, the Army itself estimated that at any one time 10 percent of its members were “hopeless incorrigibles,” frequently as a result of excessive alcohol consumption.97 The Australian reputation was no different. Discipline among the AIF volunteers was noticeably inferior in comparison to the regulars and this was apparent from the beginning, in New Guinea, and then all the way from Egypt to the Somme. Looting, robbing, and raping in German held New Guinea, the first encounter of the war effort, presaged a malaise which, according to Peter Stanley by which the “Australians acquired a reputation for disorder.”98

It was neither alcohol, nor “disorder,” however, that explained the

                                                                                                               96 Robert Fisk, “The Gallipoli centenary is a shameful attempt to hide the Armenian holocaust,” http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-gallipoli-centenary-is-a-shameful-attempt-to-hide-the-armenian-holocaust-9988227.html, accessed 23 January 2015. 97 Boyack, Behind the Lines, pp. 152, 163 and 175. 98 Peter Stanley, Bad Characters Sex, Crime, Mutiny, Murder and the Australian Imperial Force (Millers Point: Pier 9, 2010), 16-18.

 

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worst breakdown of discipline, the premeditated massacre by Australian, New Zealand (predominantly) and Scots soldiers of 137 male inhabitants from the village of Surafend and a nearby Bedouin camp in Palestine in response to alleged murder of a New Zealand trooper.99

Further complicating the fusion of national identity with the

hegemonic masculine image in the ANZAC legend is the indisputable presence in the record of what was known contemporaneously as an unmanly characteristic: venereal disease (VD), contracted while serving in the armed forces.100 In the context of the men from Australia and New Zealand being fit, healthy, clean living, high-spirited, and at worst larrikins, and national sexual mores of a very conservative hue, VD was especially stigmatic because of its debilitating effects upon the ability to perform as a soldier. Initially there was a two-pronged approach to prevent contracting of the disease – the one medical, the other moral. Soldiers were told of the medical impact this disease had on their bodies, a message reinforced by reductions in pay and religious denunciations that their behaviour was sinful and warranting condemnation.101 Whether these admonitions were effective or not is difficult to say. Infection rates increased throughout the war, rising to “epidemic proportions” among New Zealand troops in the United Kingdom.102 After the way the Director General of Health concluded that the infection rate among the country’s military personnel was approximately 1:9 and a secret document to the government estimated it even higher.103 For the AIF Arthur Graham Butler cites the mean of overseas AIF personnel admitted to hospitals for VD as 84.79 per 1,000, per year – a total of 52,538.104

                                                                                                               99 Ibid, pp. 163-167, in conjunction with Paul Daley, Beersheba: A Journey Through Australia’s Forgotten War (Melbourne: Victory Books, 2011), pp. 327-346. 100 The concerned conditions of this disease were – syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid. Arthur Graham Butler, “The Venereal Diseases in the War of 1914-18,” Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, 1914-1918, Volume 111 – Special Problems and Services (1st Edition, 1943) (The Australian War Memorial) accessed January 6, 2015. http://awm.gov.au 101 Butler, “The Venereal Diseases in the War of 1914-18,” 151. 102 Christopher Pugsley, On the Fringe of Hell: New Zealanders and Military Discipline in the First World War (Auckland: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991), p. 159 (hereafter cited as Pugsley, On the Fringe of Hell). 103 Boyack, Behind the Lines, p. 146. 104 Op cit., 187.  

 

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As might be inferred, the ANZAC soldiers were militant in their regard for sex. And it was militancy that led to the so-called Battle of Wazzir (Haret Al Wassir, the red-light district of Cairo frequented in great numbers by Australian and New Zealand troops) on Good Friday, 2 April 1915. The cause was retribution upon the ‘prostitutes’ 105 from whom they had contracted VD. This ‘battle’ was not the only one of its kind; it was repeated on July 31 1915.106

To emphasise an earlier caveat, none of this has been part of an ‘official cover-up’ because, as Stanley states, “All the records are sitting in the National Archives. But Australians have preferred to dwell on the positives … and they have been reluctant to ask questions which result in awkward answers.” Had a fuller version of the truth been told regarding the ordinary men who went off to war and became part of a legend, it might have dulled the need for “a national image of military virtues.”107 This would rob the legend of its dramatic appeal but more than compensate for that indulgence by offering what Christopher Pugsley so eloquently expressed as a story:

of men in combat and men in crisis . . . The war itself is only a background to see men as themselves. ‘War is waged by men; not by beasts, or by gods. It is a peculiarly human activity.’108

While the organisation of this paper precludes a detailed examination

of World War II, and the reliance upon the United States that emerged during

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              105 This is the term used at this point of history rather than the term ‘sex worker’ which is used by many researchers and others today. 106 NZHistory, New Zealand history online, “Anzac soldiers riot in Cairo’s Wazzir brothel district,” accessed January 20, 2015 http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/page/anzac-soldiers-riot-cairos-wazzir-brothel-district see also, Stanley, Bad Characters Sex, Crime, Mutiny, Murder and the Australian Imperial Force 2010: 27-33. 107 Graham Seal, “The Echo of an ANZAC’s Cooee: The Creation, Dissemination and Impact of Digger Culture,” accessed January 6, 2015. http://research.humanities.curtin.edu.au/groups/awp/pdf/Echo_of_Anzac_Cooee.pdf 108 Pugsley, On the Fringe of Hell, pp. 7-8. The passage in quotation marks is from Frederic Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune, Author’s Prefatory Note, Peter Davies, 1978.

 

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and after it, there is a need to foreshadow the indulgences extended by Australia and New Zealand to their “great and powerful friend” through an excursion in British perfidy in general, and by Winston Churchill in particular. This is not for the purposes of gratuitously compiling a catalogue of grievances but to establish the profound faith in the security guarantor of the moment which triumphs over all experience to the extent that when one fails, fidelity is transferred autonomically to a successor. Reflection and contemplation upon the historical record are thus involuntarily rejected almost as if the subjects had received a de facto lobotomy and were operating purely on the level of sensory perception or some other configuration of the Australasian political imaginary that cannot integrate episodes and tendencies to form a critical understanding.

Immediately set aside were key events that were disastrously and deceitfully conceived, incompetently executed, and resulted in strategic failures of considerable proportions, or were part of a chronic sequence of such events. The landing in the Dardanelles, in April 1915, is a case in point: one of many schemes devised by Winston Churchill, later to enjoy the status of iconic leader in World War II. Yet posterity, sometimes foolish and frequently generous to a fault, has paid too little attention to his substance and the consequences of his decisions despite the evidence. Contemporaneously, he was held by his peers (ambassadors, private secretaries, generals, air marshals) to be “a demagogue, a bluffer, an incompetent, and an inebriate.” As Lord Hankey wrote in 1941 of his experience over three decades with him:

[H]e is not what he thinks himself, a great master of the art of war. Up to now he has never brought off any great military enterprise. However, defensible they may have been, Antwerp, Gallipoli, and the expedition to help the White Russians at the end of the last war were all failures. He made some frightful errors of judgment between the two wars in military matters, e.g. obstructing the construction of new ships in 1925 . . . . his false estimates of the value of French generals & French military methods . . . It was he who forces us

 

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into the Norwegian affair which failed; the Greek affair which failed; and the Cretan affair which is failing.109

And the term “iconic” is bordering on the absurd for it too often

obscures the explicit support that Churchill, as a member of the Tory establishment well into the 1930s, pro-Nazi, pro-Fascist, pro-Confederacy, and explicitly and consistently racist (the last-mentioned enduring well beyond World War II itself). 110 It serves also to revise his popularly conceived personality: Hitchens, in reviewing several biographies of Churchill, and histories of his times, noted that they described a “vaulting prince of opportunists.”111 And finally, it condemns to forgetfulness the significant role that he and British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, as a minority in the Liberal Government’s cabinet in 1914, played in persuading their colleagues to go to war. Although, publicly, it was justified by the need to carry out the obligations of solemn treaties and agreements, it was in reality a decision based on the tawdry domestic political calculation that it would keep the Tory opposition from Government.112

Calculations of a similar character were to the fore if we examine Churchill’s long-term advocacy and enthusiasm for chemical warfare: as Secretary of State for War in 1919, he ordered chemical weapons to be used against the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds (“uncivilised tribes”) of the recently formed, but inherently unstable state of Iraq who resisted its establishment. In the same year, he planned and ordered a sustained chemical attack on the Bolsheviks in Northern Russia. The same instinct is recorded in Churchill’s World War II papers when he was Prime Minister.113 While some of the

                                                                                                               109 Lord Hankey, as cited in Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays (New York: Nation Books, 2004), pp. 17-18 (hereafter cited as Hitchens, Love, Poverty & War). 110 Ibid, pp. 12-14. 111 Ibid, p. 15. 112 For an account of this, see: Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (New York and London: Penguin, 1998). 113 See, for example, Robert Wilbur, “Why Churchill Matters,” a review of Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him And The World He Made (New York: Henry Holt, 2010), http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/747:why-churchill-matters, accessed 2 February 2015; Giles Milton, “Winston Churchill's Shocking Use of Chemical Weapons,” http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article36061.htm, accessed 2 February 2015; and, “Winston  

 

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documentation canvassed here was not available for many years, their eventual release has done little to effect a reconsideration of a reputation already undeserving of its lustre.

Not even betrayal in the course of World War II could provide adequate grounds for reconsideration. In the context of Australia and New Zealand's vulnerability to Japan should the fortress of Singapore fall, Britain assured both that they would be "covered" by the Royal Navy. Indeed, in August 1940, the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs sent what the New Zealand historian David McIntyre described as a "remarkable document" to Wellington:

Similarly, as regards Australia, it is sufficient for current purposes to

note that, in return for Australia’s commitment to Britain’s defence in 1939, the latter promised to defend Australia from any Japanese attack with little concern for the possibility of it ever being implemented. When, however, it was required to be implemented, Churchill not only tried to prevent substantial American forces being set to the Pacific but even attempted to delay the repatriation of Australian troops to a country that was basically defenceless before the advancing Japanese forces. To the Australian (Labor) Government of the time the British decisions of 1942, which determined the fall of Singapore, and thus the peril, which Australia faced, were on

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Churchill's Secret Poison Gas Memo,” http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article999.htm, accessed 2 February 2015. 114 As cited in McIntyre, "The Future of the New Zealand System of Alliances,"pp. 331-332.

If . . . contrary to prudence and self-interest, Japan set about invading Australia and New Zealand . . . I have the explicit authority of the Cabinet to assure you that we should then cut our losses in the Mediterranean and proceed to your aid, sacrificing every interest except only the defence of the safety of this Island on which all depends.114

 

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“inexcusable betrayal.”115 To General Douglas MacArthur, the abrogation of British promises to the Dominion also comprised a betrayal.116 More than anything else, the fact that Churchill’s actions are judged by his wartime reputation as a leader, rather than the other way around, almost disappears the blood sacrifice to be found in his defeats. And yet they, too, are tawdry, as indicated by his “hysterical” February 1942 cable to General Wavell “about the unthinkable prospect of the loss of Singapore:“

There must at this stage be no thought of saving the troops or sparing the population. The battle must be fought to the bitter end at all costs . . . . Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops. The honour of the British Empire and of the British Army is at stake. I rely on you to show no mercy in any form. With the Russians fighting as they are and the Americans so stubborn at Luzon, the whole reputation of our country and our race is involved.117

This directive, it should be noted, was in the context of Churchill’s

belief that the soldiers he required to fight “to the bitter end” were insufficiently worthy for the great deeds and great sacrifices that were expected of them. Specifically, he was “hoping, in his own words, to impress the Americans by a great human sacrifice. 118 That his order was countermanded by the Allied Supreme Commander in Southeast Asia, General Archibald Wavell was, overall, of little consolation: the General Officer Commanding Malaya, Lieutenant-General Percival, was a career officer who had never commanded an Army Corps, fought for a time (at the cost of 2,500 dead and 1,400 wounded amongst the Australians) then, with Wavell’s consent, surrendered, to become a Prisoner of War, and with him, 100,000, including 15,000 Australians, in what Churchill described as the

                                                                                                               115 David Day, The Great Betrayal: Britain, Australia and the Onset of the Pacific War (North Ryde, NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1988), esp. p. 351. 116 ibid. 117 Christopher Hitchens, Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship (London: Atlantic Books, 2006), p. 213. 118 Hitchens, Love, Poverty & War, p. 19.

 

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“worst disaster” and “greatest capitulation” in British history.119 It was also in the context of a Churchillian disposition of an entirely sinister character – namely, via appeasement of Japan, to close off the supply routes through Burma for the Nationalist Chinese resistance to Japan, and then to barter away the imperial periphery, in dealings with Roosevelt and Hitler, Northern Ireland, the Falkland Islands, the Channel Islands, Malta, Gibraltar, and British colonies in Africa and the Caribbean.120

Such perfidy, nevertheless, would seem to have been a matter of policy for Great Britain. According to papers captured from the British steamer Automedon by the Germans, after they had sunk it off the Nicobar Islands in November 1940, the British War Cabinet had by that date already abandoned any hope of saving Singapore and Malaya in the event of a Japanese attack, and were communicating this to their Commander-in-Chief, Far East, Air Chief Marshall Sir Robert Brooke-Popham. Churchill was thus not only aware that this secret would soon be passed to Japan but decided that the loss of the documents was so sensitive that it, too, was a secret, and so allowed Australia to continue pouring reinforcements into Singapore.121

War and the United States Alliance

When Britain, with the fall of Singapore, became the first god-that-failed, Australia entered into a security relationship with another Great Power whose international history, though not as extensive as Britain's, was remarkably similar in character. To state the case most boldly the United States is, to borrow from Geoffrey Perret's recent work "a country made by war."122 Notwithstanding the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the Civil War, the US, by 1942, had established its credentials an enthusiast for the international system and its practices by its role in the Spanish-American

                                                                                                               119 Winston Churchill, The Hinge of Fate, Vol. 4 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1986), p. 81 120 Hitchens, Love, Poverty & War, pp. 18-21. 121 J. Rusbridger & E. Nave, Betrayal at Pearl harbour: How Churchill Lured Roosevelt into WWII, (Summit, New York, 1991), pp. 99-106. 122 Geoffrey Perret, A Country Made by War: From the Revolution to Vietnam - The Story of America's Rise to Power (New York: Random House, 1989), hereafter cited as Perret, A Country Made by War.

 

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War, the Mexican War, and World War I. By 1980 the United States had managed to participate in eight international wars at a cost of nearly 700,000 dead. On average each war lasted longer (33 months) than those of Britain, and resulted in a higher average of lost lives (83,000).123 Even if allowance is made for the analytical advantages which extensions of time permit, a pattern was discernible in the proneness to, and consequences of war for Australia's protectors at crucial junctures in the country's history - 1914, 1965 and at all times since 1945 in the case of nuclear deterrence and the Cold War. Thus there was an availability of historical data which to a lesser, but not a significantly lesser extent, confirmed the findings of a recent study of power system membership and patterns of war:

for the categories of all nations, major powers and minor powers, no statistically significant relationships were evidenced between past and subsequent war duration or war severity: the probable duration or severity of a nation's next war is unaffected by the duration or severity of its last war . . .

irrespective of the characteristics of past or current war behaviour, in the long run: a nation that fights a war has more than a one-in-three probability of fighting for over two years and sustaining over 15,000 battle fatalities; major powers are more likely to fight moderate wars; major powers and minor powers have roughly equiprobable chances of fighting wars at short, moderate and long duration levels. Hence, it is concluded that a nation's aggregate capability (i.e. power status) not its antecedent experience - is a determinant of the scale of its wars.124 (Emphasis added)

To interpolate the above, once committed to a war, states forget the past and need to learn anew the costs it will involve. Wars, in any case, tend to be long and expensive in human terms, and wars fought by major powers are particularly long and particularly expensive. From which it follows that minor powers aligned with major powers share the risks and eventually the significant costs of conflicts that are, at root, derivations from a status that is beyond them. The war selected accords with this interpretation. Similarly, in Vietnam, the "logic" of Australia's involvement was never compelling. Had it                                                                                                                123 Daniel S. Geller, "Power System Membership and Patterns of War", International Political Science Review 9 (1988): 372-3. 124 Ibid.

 

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been, the Prime Minister of Australia, R.G. Menzies, would never have had to lie to the Australian people in general and the Australian Parliament in particular about the circumstances of the Government of South Vietnam's request to Canberra. 125 It was always going to be difficult, perhaps impossible, to explain, inter alia, why, if Australia and New Zealand’s geographic closeness to Indo-China was so crucial, countries much closer and virulently anti-communist (Malaysia and Singapore for example) declined to be involved. In New Zealand’s case, the claim itself was problematic, as McIntyre pointed out: “It is helpful to remember that London is closer to Hanoi than Christchurch is.”126

Or why even those external, Asian nations which did contribute forces (the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand) did so in such a debased, mercenary enterprise that Senator William Fulbright referred to just part of it - the $US1 billion for the Thai Division - as 'the ultimate in corruption.'127 Or why, if the 'domino theory' was to be taken seriously as a threat to containment, the states of Western Europe, many with considerable economic interests in South East Asia, showed no interest in assisting; on the contrary, the United Kingdom traded with North Vietnam in a war in which the major NATO power and two SEATO (and Commonwealth) partners were engaged. And ultimately, why, with none of the initial objectives of the war achieved, Australia followed the U.S lead of withdrawal with barely a suspecting glance that it was either betraying an honourable cause or acknowledging a fraudulent one.

For those in Australia who hoped that the future might be an improvement on the past, the Vietnam War was a reminder that, though alliance leaders might change, their behaviour remains constant. Thus, as in 1914, the public rationale for the necessity of war was to be found in a politically defensible mélange which consisted of the racist mechanics of the “Domino Theory,” a fear of “wars of national liberation” in Southeast Asia, and the containment of China, the principle concern of the United States was, according the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, that South Vietnam be “regarded as a test case” that “would demonstrate the will and the ability of

                                                                                                               125 See, for example, Michael Sexton, War for the Asking: Australia's Vietnam Secrets (Penguin Australia, 1981). 126 McIntyre, "The Future of the New Zealand System of Alliances," p. 342. 127 Morning Star, 20 November 1969.

 

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the United States . . . . as the most powerful nation in the world . . . to have its way in world affairs.” And this indeed was what the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, John T. McNaughton, outlined in a now infamous memorandum in 1964.

The objective often attributed to the US – that South Vietnam should enjoy a “better freer, way of life” - was barely a priority at all, being accorded only 10 percent of the overall rationale.128 But this was only part of a transformation by McNamara to thinking and behaving according to a script by Churchill: in his memoirs and other published works he locates his conclusion that the war was “militarily unwinnable” in 1965–1966, even as early as 1964, but there is no record of him ever communicating his pessimisms and misgivings to the President. What is on record are his memoranda – such as the one jointly written with National Security Adviser, McGeorge Bundy, on 27 January 1965, before the full extent of the US troop build–up, and before the (Australian) National Service Act (1964) had been amended to require conscripts to serve overseas - recommending that the President pursue a military solution in Vietnam.129 It should be noted that, when he left office in 1968 US casualties numbered some 25,000; in the period of his continuing silence through to the end of the War, they increased by another 23,000.130 In Australia the figures were 209 dead and over 1,500 wounded.

Whether public candour at the highest levels of the US Government, or among its former highest office-holders would have made any difference is a matter of conjecture. As the official histories of the war, and numerous other commentaries make clear, by the time that McNamara had become privately pessimistic, the repeated overtures made by the Australian Government of R.G. Menzies demonstrate that a dependent personality disorder was well

                                                                                                               128 The Pentagon Papers, as published by The New York Times (New York: Bantam, 1971), p. 255. The citation regarding South Vietnam being a “test case” is from a McNamara document; the other citations relating to this footnote are provided from the text of those who authored the commentary on The Pentagon Papers. 129 George Ball, “The Rationalist in Power,” a review of Deborah Shapley, Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara (New York: Little Brown, 1993), The New York Review of Books, 22 April 1993, p. 35. 130 Deborah Shapley, “McNamara’s Inner War,” The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, July/August 1995, p. 14.

 

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established. The Coalition Government of R.G. Menzies not only was frequently given to demanding that the war be fought with greater force levels than the US thought prudent or necessary, but also resorted to dishonesty concerning the nature of the request by the Government of South Vietnam to provide military force to its country.

Nothing disturbed the dominant mode of thought, not even events which undermined Australian security in a Churchillian way. Two examples might suffice: the first was the involvement of a handful of personnel from the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam (AATTV) in the infamous Phoenix Programme in the years 1967-1970. 131 Phoenix, ostensibly, was designed to incorporate a capacity for the "collection, collation and dissemination of intelligence and the conduct of operations against the [Viet Cong infrastructure]."132 In executing this task, which was in effect a CIA-run counter-terror operation, somewhere between 20,000 and 60,000 Viet Cong, communist sympathisers and, in all probability, thousands of innocent Vietnamese were killed, though the authors of Oyster are probably more accurate when they use the term "exterminated.”133 This programme, which used Australian personnel working entirely outside the national line of command and directly for the CIA, required them (and others on different programmes) frequently to cross illegally into North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, often wearing the uniform of the enemy.134 And as its "counter-terror" component suggested, and as its historical development confirmed, Phoenix too easily became an indiscriminate and brutal payback (for some Vietnamese) and murder campaign.135 Barton Osborne, an American who helped direct Phoenix operations at Da Nang in its early stages, stated that, even then, it had run amok:

... by late 1968 the Phoenix program was not serving any legitimate function that I know of, but rather had gone so wrong that it was the vehicle by which we

                                                                                                               131 ibid., p. 90. 132 Ian McNeil, The Team: Australian Army Advisers in Vietnam, 1962-1972 (St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1984), p. 396 (hereafter cited as McNeil, The Team). 133 Toohey and Pinwill, Oyster, pp. 87-8. 134 ibid., p. 87. 135 McNeil, The Team, pp. 408-10.

 

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were getting into a bad genocide program (emphasis added).136

Small wonder, then, that those members of AATTV who worked directly to the CIA on Phoenix and other programmes were oath-bound to their US superiors to conceal the relationship from their Australian commanders and the Australian Government.

The second is sourced to Frank Snepp, a former senior CIA operative at the US Embassy in Saigon from 1969-1971, and 1972-1975, who confirmed that there was such a limited tolerance of Australian democracy in official circles that it spilled over into punitive contempt:

. . . after the Whitlam government came into power - there was an utter severance in our relations ... and very frankly I was told by my superiors that the Australians might as well be regarded as North Vietnamese, as North Vietnamese collaborators.137

In the end, the quality of strategic direction differed little to that which

Australia and New Zealand experienced under the British Empire. In Vietnam the US adopted a counter-insurgency doctrine that was fatally flawed because "it promised the impossible and obscured the issues critical to analysis of the prospects for success: the limits of leverage, intergovernmental constraints on reform, and the nature of government - and insurgent - population relations" (emphasis added). As Michael Shafer writes of this tainted conceptual control of the war:

For both [the Government of Vietnam and the United States], doctrine failed because it explained what ought to happen, not what would happen or what policy makers could make happen. Policy was thus blind, but bold. The combination was fatal (second emphasis added).138

                                                                                                               136 Barton Osborne, as cited in Michael Maclear, Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War (London: Thames Methven, 1981), pp. 354-5. 137 Frank Snepp, interviewed in Allies, transcript, as cited in Richelson and Ball, The Ties That Bind, pp. 259-60. 138 D. Michael Shafer, Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of US Counterinsurgency Policy (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1988), pp.274-5.

 

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War and the Post-9/11 World

If the question is asked of the last 14 years, “what’s changed?” the sad and melancholy answer must be, “not much.” Quite possibly, the situation seems to be getting worse because war is the logical outcome of the determinants of the dominant alliance partner’s strategies. The penumbra of viewing the world through the lens of Manichaeism, and the meaning which war imparts to those addicted to it guarantees war but is reinforced by powerful structures of acting and thinking which William J. Astore identifies:139

1. The privatization of war 2. The embrace of the national security state by both major parties 3. “Support Our Troops” as a substitute for thought 4. Fighting a redacted war 5. Threat inflation 6. Defining the world as a global battlefield 7. The new "normal" in America is war If anything, the prospect of war of some description has only

increased, dramatically at that: an historical survey by the Congressional Research Service reveals that, between August 1990 and August 2014, the US has deployed military force on 146 occasions, or 5 times more often than in the prior 193 years.140 This excludes the current campaign against IS in Iraq. And the overall figure may well be significantly understated:

During the fiscal year that ended on September 30, 2014, U.S. Special Operations forces (SOF) deployed to 133 countries -- roughly 70% of the nations on the planet -- according to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bockholt, a public affairs officer with U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM). This capped a three-year span in which the country’s most elite

                                                                                                               139 Tomgram: William J. Astore, “Groundhog Day in the War on Terror,” http://www.tomdispatch.com/dialogs/print/?id=175950, accessed 2 February 2015. 140 As reported in Project on Defense Alternatives, Reset Defense Bulletin, “Since Cold War the US has deployed military force 5 times more often than prior 193 years,” 15 December 2014, p. 1.

 

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forces were active in more than 150 different countries around the world, conducting missions ranging from kill/capture night raids to training exercises. And this year could be a record-breaker. . . just 66 days into fiscal 2015 -- America’s most elite troops had already set foot in 105 nations, approximately 80% of 2014’s total.141

If the public record is any guide very few of these special operations

involve Australia and New Zealand; on the other hand, the major interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq did, and it must be recorded that, by the criteria set by the United States at their outset, they were defeats, not infrequently demonstrating considerable military and strategic incompetence.142 According to a leading US counterinsurgency theorist, these results in wars he terms “knife fights” were to be expected because the US entered them without sufficient awareness of what successful counterinsurgency required.143

In this context it would be remiss not mention “Blowback” a consequence which Chalmers Johnson described as “another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows,” and it is everywhere in the politics of the Middle East and Central Asia today. In the hope of ensuring the Soviet Union had “its Vietnam War,” the Carter Administration aided and supported the Mujahideen who, according to the US, subsequently became the vanguard of Islamic fundamentalism and a world terrorist menace after 9/11. In a 1998 interview, however, Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was of the view that they were no more than “some stirred-up Moslems.”144 Also posing current security problems are terrorist organizations such as Al Qaida and IS which evidence suggests receive considerable support from an

                                                                                                               141 Nick Turse, “The Golden Age of Black Ops,” Tomgram: Nick Turse, A Shadow War in 150 Countries, 20 January 2015, http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175945/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_a_shadow_war_in_150_countries, accessed 21 January 2015. 142 See for example, Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes (Metropolitan, 2014). 143 John Nagl, Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice (Penguin, 2014). 144 Alexander Cockburn And Jeffrey St. Clair, “Zbigniew Brzezinski: How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen,” CounterPunch, 15 January 1998, http://www.counterpunch.org/1998/01/15/how-jimmy-carter-and-i-started-the-mujahideen/ accessed 3 February 2015.

 

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ostensible ally, Saudi Arabia, which in turn is shielded from close public scrutiny in various ways and for various reasons by the US and the UK.145

Over time, furthermore, the need to counter and provoke Russia has been returned to a central preoccupation, as has the need to contain China: Cold War thinking has become resurgent and Cold War practice has followed it with a nuclear weapons modernization programme estimated to cost at USD1 trillion.146

Australia and New Zealand observe silence on all of this. They say nothing about the involvement of the United States in torture, or that no one in the United States is being held accountable for torture even when they boast that they authorised it. Henry Kissinger remains a revered figure in both countries despite the evidence that he is a serial war criminal, complicit in the genocide in East Timor under Indonesian rule and, like Churchill before him, an architect of strategic failures. Nothing is said about the

corruption involving defence contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, or that in  

2008   (by   way   of   example),   members   of   the   United   States   Congress   had   as  

much  as  $196  million  collectively  invested  in  companies  doing  business  with  

the  Defense  Department,  and  had  earned  millions  since   the  start  of   the   Iraq  

war.147    Nothing  is  said  about  the  suicide  rate  of  US  veterans  (22  per  day)  who  

served  alongside  Australian  and  New  Zealand  soldiers.  And  nothing  is  said  

                                                                                                               145  Justin Raimondo,  “Did Certain Foreign Governments Facilitate the 9/11 Attacks?– and why is the US government keeping the evidence a secret?” Antiwar.com. 29 August 2014, http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2014/08/28/did-certain-foreign-governments-facilitate-the-911-attacks/ accessed 3 February 2015; Owen Jones, “To really combat terror, end support for Saudi Arabia,” theguardian.com, 31 August 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/31/combat-terror-end-support-saudi-arabia-dictatorships-fundamentalism, accessed 3 February 2015, and Institute for Public Accuracy, “13 Years After 9/11; Has ISIS Been ‘A Saudi Project’?” 10 September 2014, http://www.accuracy.org 146 Theodore Postol, “How the Obama Administration Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” The Nation, http://www.thenation.com, 10 December 2014, accessed 12 December 2014. 147  Lindsay Renick Mayer, "Strategic Assets,” available at http://www.opensecrets.org/capital_eye/inside.php?ID=342   accessed   14   July   2008.     The   review   of  lawmakers'ʹ   2006   financial   disclosure   statements,   by   the   Washington-­‐‑based   Center   for   Responsive  Politics,  suggests  that  members'ʹ  holdings  could  pose  a  conflict  of  interest  as  they  decide  the  fate  of  Iraq  war   spending.   To   be   noted   is   the   fact   that   several   members   who   earned   the   most   from   defence  contractors   have   significant   committee   or   leadership   assignments,   including   Democratic   Sen.   John  Kerry,   independent   Sen.   Joseph   Lieberman   and   House   Republican   Whip   Roy   Blunt.     Overall,   151  members  hold  investments  that  earned  them  anywhere  between  $15.8  million  and  $62  million  between  2004  and  2006.        

 

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about   what   is   only   the   latest   episode   in   the   campaign   to   define   the   US  

military   as   the   Christian   fundamentalist   army   of   God   –   a   recruiting   poster  

which   displays   the   shoulder   tabs   of   the   US   Special   Forces   (Special   Forces,  

Ranger,   Airborne)   accompanied   by   the   sectarian   slogan:   “ON   A   MISSION  

FOR  BOTH  GOD  AND  COUNTRY.”148  

                                                                                                               148 Mikey Weinstein /AlterNet / Op-Ed, US Army Special Forces Officially Recruit for "Mission for God," http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/28719-us-army-special-forces-officially-recruit-for-mission-for-god, accessed 30 January 2015.

 

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Reflections on Responses

We start with two observations, the first of the National Capital, Canberra – a place which, when it’s completed, might one day be quite interesting. Along one of its more prominent thoroughfares - ANZAC Avenue – are numerous memorials to those who have served and died in the now many wars that Australia has participated in. The whole precinct speaks to commemorated violence. It is, of course, connected to the Australian War Memorial – an impressive building and one built with honourable intentions. The authors of this paper now approach it with a sense of deep foreboding: if you wish to share this sense of uneasiness, of dread, may we refer you to the Memorial’s web site.

For some years now, at KidsHQ – the intended audience is obviously children – those logged on are challenged by way of a video, to “see if you

can bust the dam” – as did the famous Dam Busters of 617 Squadron.149 Left unmentioned is the fact that the Dam Busters’ raid was of dubious legality under the Laws of War, as they existed, and was arguably a war crime. At Shop Spotlight – the Online Shop – you can order a Bush Camouflage Bear with Disruptive Pattern Camouflage Uniform and / or a Vietnam Digger

Bear.150 And in the Memorial’s Discovery Zone – the “hands-on [family-oriented] education space” made available through “cutting edge museum technology” – visitors can “experience the life of a chopper pilot in Vietnam.” The web site shows a photograph of a 10-12 year old, in a junior flight suit, headphones on, strapped into the pilot’s seat of a display Iroquois

helicopter.151 But the choice is wide, both historically and in the sense of the virtual experiences on offer. The Digital Media Backgrounder the Discovery Zone advises that, from July 2008, the “family-friendly interactive gallery experience will also include the ability to: “Dodge sniper fire in a First World War trench. Peer through the periscope of a Cold War submarine.” The

                                                                                                                149 http://www.awm.gov.au/kidshq/technology/technology.asp?usr= accessed 14 July 2008. 150 http://cas.awm.gov.au/TST2/glbx.accept_login?screen_name=shop_pkg.pr_home&screen_parms=acid=&screen_type=BOTTOM accessed 14 July 2008. 151 http://www.awm.gov.au/virtualtour/discovery.asp accessed 14 July 2008.

 

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invitation, particularly to children, is to “climb, jump, crawl, touch and explore in all areas of the Discovery Zone . . . [which] . . . looks, feels and

even smells different to the Memorial’s other galleries.”152 In Canberra, there is no Peace Memorial, or tribute to those who have pursued it, or even to those who have opposed war. Nor is there any mention of the fact that, of the more than 10,000 aircraft lost in the Vietnam War, just over 5,000 were helicopters.153

For those who might think that too much is being made of this well-funded popularization of wartime experience and that, overall, it is at worst a neutral influence of the national culture there I would refer them to reports in the metropolitan dailies that Australian Defence Force personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq were “ashamed to wear the uniform,” because they

were being assigned low-risk missions.154 Regardless of the operational basis of the claim, it should be a matter of high concern that, in response to the report, the following response was posted:

I’m 14 and an Australian girl and proud to be by the way!!! and i have always wanted to join the army from a very young age and to think that Australian's are signing up knowing they could die in frontlines for their country is a brave honourable thing to do. SO LET THEM!!155

The second observation concerns the ANZAC Memorial in Hyde Park South. The central motif of the design is Rayner Hoff’s, The Sacrifice, officially described as a bronze group of sculptures depicting the recumbent figure of a young warrior who has made the supreme sacrifice; his naked body lies upon a shield which is supported by three womenfolk - his best loved Mother, Wife

                                                                                                               152 www.awm.gov.au/media/releases/download.asp?Media_Release_ID=99 accessed 14 July 2008. 153 Chris, Hobson, Vietnam Air Losses, USAF, USN, USMC, Fixed-Wing Aircraft Losses in Southeast Asia 1961–1973 (North Branch, Minnesota: Specialty Press, 2001), and René Francillon, Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club: US Carrier Operations off Vietnam (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1988). 154 Jonathan Pearlman, Defence Correspondent, “Ashamed to wear uniform,” The Sydney Morning Herald, http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2009/05/26/1211653939158.html accessed 29 May 2008. 155 LET THEM!!Posted by: crewz, perth, wa, on 27/05/2008 1:40:27 PM, http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=569651 accessed 30 May 2008.

 

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and Sister and in the arms of one is a child, the future generations for whom the sacrifice has been made.

20-OCT-2007 © Flemming Bo Jensen Sacrifice Sculpture at THE ANZAC War Memorial, Sydney

Australia, New South Wales, Sydney

 

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According to the associated educational publicity, “it illustrates the sacrifice engendered by war, self-sacrifice for duty and the beautiful quality of womanhood which, in the war years, with quiet courage and noble

resignation, bore its burdens, the loss of sons, husbands and lovers.”156

It is a striking sculpture – far more appropriate to it subject matter than the much larger project in Canberra – yet also disturbing because it deceives. It cannot speak of the event that took the lives that it commemorates – The Great War – and the politics of neurotic nationalism of a European order in decay. While it may very well be the case that the Sacrifice sculpture illustrates everything that it is claimed, the educational publicity is radically incomplete. Not only are the grand strategic disasters of World War I absent, the passage cited implies both a passivity in the face of them and the expectation that future generations will be required to make the same sacrifice that is depicted. But it is radically incomplete in another way, too: pedestals had been built of the eastern and western walls of the memorial for two more sculptures by Hoff, The Crucifixion of Civilisation, and Victory After Sacrifice, neither of which were ever installed.

                                                                                                               156 http://www.anzacday.org.au/education/tff/memorials/nsw.html accessed 14 July 2008.

 

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The reason was that The Crucifixion of Civilisation offended too many people, not least the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Sydney, who found the naked figure on the cross, a lithe young woman, sitting atop a pyramid of broken soldiers corpses, weapons, helmets, and debris of battle to be contrary to “ordinary Christian decency,” and “the whole spirit of Christendom.” It was “immoral,” “revolting,” and “offensive.” Hoff’s notion that war requires the crucifixion of “adolescent peace” was entirely unacceptable and in a society with pronounced Catholic – Protestant divisions the sculptures were withdrawn. According to inquiries in recent years, seems to have entirely disappeared without trace from the vaults in which they were stored.157 The architect of the memorial at the time, Bruce Dellit, described the resultant appearance of it as “like a countenance without an eye”158 and this has proven to be an enduring and accurate description of the state of affairs in war remembrance in Australia and New Zealand. Both suffer from a disabling blindness. In Australia especially, it is ably assisted by the well-resourced Australian War Memorial, the imposing and elaborate conceptual structure that is the true cathedral of vulgar Australian national identity. Its influence of ordering the past for a country of 23 million might be estimated from its 2013 Annual Report that details extremely high levels of contact with public, including 1.1 million visitors and an audience of over 16 million during the ANZAC Day period.159

The blood sacrifice continues but it does so in the scheme outlined earlier by Marvin and Ingle. The nation state requires the death of its own but the processes by which this is brought about must be masked by ritual politically manipulated identity reliant on an encouraged obsession with a memory that supports a certain social awareness. It explicitly requires an obsession with forgetting those aspects of the historical responses to war

                                                                                                               157 Paul Sheehan, “Peace offering that shocked the church,” FairfaxDigital, http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/04/18/1082226632478.html, accessed 2 February 2015. 158 Ibid.

159 Australian War Memorial Annual Report 2012-2013, p. xiv, http://www.awm.gov.au/sites/default/files/AnnualReport2013.pdf , accessed 2 February 2015.

 

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which would provoke contempt or derision in the status quo were they to become widely known and seen to be almost identical to contemporary claims. It is not a forced situation so much as an Australasian variant of Spain’s pacta de olvido – an agreement to forget (Franco’s crimes).160 It requires only obedience and the passivity of the public mind. Over time, and we are talking decades in the current context, both the declarative memory (that which is consciously recalled), and the non-declarative memory (that which is essentially reflexive), are enhanced just as the condition of anterograde amnesia (the inability to form new memories) becomes a settled state. The past is therefore captured and becomes malleable raw material that can be bent to the service of political and economic power. In an age in which political and economic power have, through the imposition of neoliberalism upon the Western Education systems at all levels, already determined that the principal carriers of critical political, social and historical scholarship are increasingly irrelevant, the past is easily changed to whatever narrative suits the prevailing requirements. Left unexamined, inter alia, and to the advantage of all religious belief, is that interrogation of what James Baldwin phrased as the “habits of thought [that] reinforce and sustain the habits of power.”161

Given that the practices here outlined are designed to protect the canons of national identity and the faith of the population from the error held to be found in certain critical or revisionist accounts, they lie historically somewhere between the pre-Gutenberg era of restricted literacy and the advent of the index Librorum Prohibitorum. It is not that people cannot read if they want to; rather, they are encouraged to read but within the corpus of comfortable narratives of reassurance to which they give undue deference to the point of lethal and irresponsible restraint. The result is a self-hypnotic trap that begins with the confident faith in the national war story and the governments that promote it; over time it breeds complacency or, when that is shattered, fatalism and resignation, even recklessness.

                                                                                                               160 Jonathan Blitzer, “Memory Politics,” a review of Jeremy Treglown, Franco’s Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), The Nation, 20 January 2014, p. 34. 161 As cited in JoAnn Wypijewski, “A Guide in Dark Times: Why it’s essential to read James Baldwin now,” The Nation, 9 February 2015, p. 4.